The issue is a practical and a philosophical one. For people who reached maturity before the millennium, the word photograph meant print. Prints could be 6 x 4" in an envelope from the high street lab, beautiful 16 x 20"s to frame on a wall, or smudgy dot screen pictures in the newspaper, but all were tangible hard copies on paper. A significant minority shots slides exclusively of course, and viewed photography as a presentational medium to an invited audience in darkened rooms. Digital photography is like a much expanded version of the latter, people showing images created largely in the camera, directly to a sympathetic audience. The main difference is a boring "slide" is no longer under the control of the chap with the button.
Camera technology is such that someone can press the shutter on an image in the viewfinder, and focus, exposure, colour balance, tonality will be optimised for transmission to thousands of people in seconds. That satisfies the aspiration of most photographers, who are content to defer process to Canon, Adobe, Google or whoever for their content exclusively. Clearly some people baulk at that access/imposition according to temperament, and want something they feel in control of.
Digital cameras are a hangover from an earlier era. They are sold on the basis of larger, sharper, quicker attributes of the film world, which are redundant to the overwhelming majority in the electronic viewing age. A smartphone image can fill a laptop screen more than adequately, and a M43 shot shows corner to corner sharpness and impeccable resolution even on my large monitor. With the exception of professionals who pay the mortgage from their work, most digital photographs rarely if ever make it to a print size which exploits the camera's capabilities.
I'm pragmatic about developments. iphones continue to be the default photographic tool, the technological Swiss Army Knife promised in the 1950s. Digital cameras will still sell to people obsessed with the things photographers have always obsessed about. Film cameras appeal to those who see the print as the natural culmination of a photographic process requiring visualisation, maths and chemistry. Or just the novelty of pressing a shutter where the click is not an audio simulation. What's undoubtedly the case is in embracing access we've handed over ownership to those who mediate our pictures for their purposes, not ours.
