No, Joseph is not correct that 35 mm format lenses have higher resolving power.
Some do. Some don't. And some MF lenses have higher resolution than 35 mm lenses.
You can indeed examine the results with a loupe, and discover that many 35 mm lenses are even far worse than most MF lenses.
MTF curves, by the way, show contrast at pre-chosen resolutions. They do not give an indication of how many lp/mm a lens can resolve.
And another by the way: Photodo is the worst site to cite as evidence.
This "35 mm format lenses are better" myth is just that: a myth.
It is an old, very persistent one, yes. But a myth nevertheless.
It's origin lies in the Leica days.
The advantage of the then tiny format was not its image quality, but the portability and 'stealth', making an entirely new type of photography possible.
The often cited considerations of Oscar Barnack, calculating how 'good' 35 mm format would be, in fact were calculations trying to show that the tiny format would just 'go'.
A 'spin off' of those considerations was the (correct) observation that the lenses used on this tiny format would have to be better than the ones used on larger formats to be able to compete.
That observation became the primary marketing point: tell customers that the lenses indeed are, even if they perhaps are not.
That strategy, quite evidently, worked very, very well. People still (some 80 years later) believe this inversion of the "have to", and think they indeed "are".
But they are not.
Yes, Leitz and other manufacturers produce quite excellent 35 mm format lenses, and some of them indeed resolve more than some larger format lenses. But conversely, many do not.
