I have a shapefile in NAD83 UTM18 which I need to get into GCS NAD83. I tried both loading it into an empty GCS NAD83 feature class directly and the “project” tool. The results are the same – the source and the converted line up perfectly until zoomed in to a large scale (such as 1:3) when misalignment between the two can be seen consistently. This happens regardless of whether the data frame is set to GCS or PCS.
Is this a display issue, or due to insufficient accuracy of the on the fly conversion? Or maybe there are more complex reasons?