Funny you should say it when I just finished developing four rolls of medium format film...
Modern sensors are indeed challenging the resolution of film, but only because we stopped developing scanning technology as well as chemical film formulations. A 60mp full frame sensor is more or less equivalent to a standard colour 35mm film frame, but all those photos taken on sensors with lower resolution are stuck at 24mp, 20mp, 12mp, 10mp, and less. But even a 60mp sensor can't match the resolution of https://www.adox.de/Photo/films/cms20ii-en/ so we have a long way to go in the digital realm. The largest digital sensor you can buy or (more realistically) rent is a 150mp from Phase One and that's only 6x4.5cm, the smallest medium format frame. Digital can't currently match anything above 6x4.5 and that's what will keep film going for a while.
Another issue with digital is the lack of latitude. It was pitched against colour positive slide film when film was still popular, because that was the pinnacle of colour reproduction (and still is) but it suffers from the same issues as colour positive film--you really have to nail your exposure. However, when you see a well-lit, sharp, properly developed 8x10 colour slide film, you really don't care for digital the amount of detail beats the crap out of the highest rest sensor. I shoot Fuji GFX100 and while it is an excellent camera, it cannot easily do what I can do with my 4x5 camera in terms of movements unless I buy a Cambo Actus.
I really wish camera manufacturers kept making film cameras, because both technologies, digital and film have their uses and there is no need to abandon one for the other, they can happily exist together. We don't argue that watercolour should be ditched for oils or vice versa, why not keep making both digital and film cameras?
Yes and no. Film photography is an important artistic tool and still has applications in industry and science. Just like we don't say we don't need colour pencils or oil paints anymore now that we have iPads, we should not be ditching film photography. It is possible for it to exist and thrive. Look at the market for film simulations for digital cameras. There is no market for digital sensor simulations.
Drawing compasses are also still important creative tools. But there are tens of thousands (millions?) of excellent used ones in great condition stashed away in people's attics and 99% of professional users switched to CAD, so the market is gone.
> There is no market for digital sensor simulations
Digital sensors strive to neutrally record as much data as possible about the scene. The creative appearance part is done in software later. You're comparing apples to oranges.
There's also no market because simulating a shitty 1998 digital camera with low resolution and JPEG artifacts is not hard to accomplish using Photoshop if you really want.
> Drawing compasses are also still important creative tools. But there are tens of thousands (millions?) of excellent used ones in great condition stashed away in people's attics and 99% of professional users switched to CAD, so the market is gone.
That comparison is not fair. Drawing compasses are less complex in terms of mechanical and optical design and manufacturing than film cameras.
> The creative appearance part is done in software later. You're comparing apples to oranges.
You are right, digital is designed to have no opinionated look. It is sterile. And funnily enough most popular LUTs are simulating old film stocks.
Drawing compasses are precision instruments, quite complex to manufacture and adjust, which involved hundreds of tiny design and manufacturing improvements over several centuries of expert craftsmanship (practical knowledge now lost, except some textual summaries in 19th century books, 20th century catalogs, and scattered patents). You can't buy anything made today that is anywhere close to the quality of professional compasses from the late 19th century, and quite likely never will be able to again in the future.
> It is sterile.
A good Photoshop operator (or with more time and effort and less capability, a good dye transfer printer with a working darkroom, starting from the most "sterile" negative you can imagine) will blow any film stock you like totally out of the water.
You like having a large company's engineers force their creative preferences about color interpretation onto your art. Other artists prefer to deliberately make those choices for themselves.
Neither workflow is inherently better or worse, but some approaches are better suited to some personalities and artistic goals.
Modern sensors are indeed challenging the resolution of film, but only because we stopped developing scanning technology as well as chemical film formulations. A 60mp full frame sensor is more or less equivalent to a standard colour 35mm film frame, but all those photos taken on sensors with lower resolution are stuck at 24mp, 20mp, 12mp, 10mp, and less. But even a 60mp sensor can't match the resolution of https://www.adox.de/Photo/films/cms20ii-en/ so we have a long way to go in the digital realm. The largest digital sensor you can buy or (more realistically) rent is a 150mp from Phase One and that's only 6x4.5cm, the smallest medium format frame. Digital can't currently match anything above 6x4.5 and that's what will keep film going for a while.
Another issue with digital is the lack of latitude. It was pitched against colour positive slide film when film was still popular, because that was the pinnacle of colour reproduction (and still is) but it suffers from the same issues as colour positive film--you really have to nail your exposure. However, when you see a well-lit, sharp, properly developed 8x10 colour slide film, you really don't care for digital the amount of detail beats the crap out of the highest rest sensor. I shoot Fuji GFX100 and while it is an excellent camera, it cannot easily do what I can do with my 4x5 camera in terms of movements unless I buy a Cambo Actus.
I really wish camera manufacturers kept making film cameras, because both technologies, digital and film have their uses and there is no need to abandon one for the other, they can happily exist together. We don't argue that watercolour should be ditched for oils or vice versa, why not keep making both digital and film cameras?