Marco
interesting read ... seems to draw together stuff I've read elsewhere in the past but take a few angles differently.
I do often feel though that the writers of these things are trying to justify a standpoint which is often un-stated. In my study of research the classical viewpoint is "objective writing" where subjective statements are avoided. I find this clouds the intentions of the researcher and beguiles the reader into thinking that the statements are actually objective.
More modern approaches (and the ones I favor) take the view that the researcher can not possibly be an automaton of no inclination. So we try to build in stuff like "I found" and "my findings" as well as my assumptions and stuff like that.
It seemed to me (reading that only quickly and once as yet) that the researcher seems to regard film as 35mm and does not cover larger formats. Much time is spent discussing Kodachrome 25 (was that ever available in sheet or only 35mm + 120 roll?) which is not even the highest resolving colour film any longer. Further Kodachrome is well known for having very poor shoulder characteristics; meaning that at the edges of the dynamic range will suffer. I did not see much discussion of negative in there.
considering that Kodachrome dates from the 1930's (
ref) it is remarkable that it did what it did as well as it did it. I'm personally very happy that my father used it to take the whaling photographs he did when he was working on whale chasers in the 1950's ... I would not have such vivid representations of the world as he saw it had he not.
There's no doubt that I use digital for 90% of my photography, but as I recently found there are other situations and environments where the application of theory seems to fail. I recently did a wedding for some friends and at the last minute tilted towards film (colour negative) over digital ... I had both with me in the car and chose at the last minute. Despite the offering in that article that a TIFF is superior to film because of its linearity it was exactly because I did not want that linearity that I chose negative. For instance, this image:
would not have been possible to capture in this way with the digital. There would not have been the capture of texture in the white fabric of if there would have been then the dark textures available. I have discussions on the prints made from different scanning systems
here. Please excuse my poor copy stand attempts to show what the prints actually look liked.
So what I'm saying is that while its a good read and I thank you for posting it, its not the only view of the picture. All the maths in the world can prove a bumble bee can't fly ... but seeing is believing. This is why I spend so much time to know my media so that I use my media to best benefits. Film is different to digital. Once upon a time digital was a poor cousin, but times are different now and digital capture easily stands so well on its own two feet we can forget there are still uses for and advantages in the demonstrably "inferior".