This is a 35 mm slide, scanned at 600 dpi (optical resolution), with the Exposure at 402 and all other settings at the defaults. I used a 13 watt compact fluorescent backlight, with a piece of translucent white plastic to diffuse the light.

I sharpened the image with PhotoImpact's Effects/Sharpen, level 3.  (The standard Autofocus produces a cleaner, less pixelated image when it's magnified.)  The result here is sharp enough to show the wire fence clearly, the rice shoots in the water, and the grassy bank in the middle distance looks like grass, not just a green blur.  By magnifying the image two or three times, some detail is visible in the distant buildings, which are about two miles away from the camera. 

Even so, a 600 dpi scan of a 35 mm slide is never going to look really really sharp, no matter how great the interpolated resolution or how many other enhancement tricks you try.  To see a sample of a much higher optical resolution scan--1950 dpi--try this example by Wayne Fulton.

This shot is badly framed, but the subject--Korean farmers planting rice just outside the fence of a U.S. Army airfield, A-33, in the 1950s--may be interesting.
 

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