it is striking that people have such a misapprehension of the resolution of 35mm film
I agree with you. I've recently become a film nut, but I agree that modern high-end digital outperforms film hands down. That said, film is still great but a lot of people still think very poorly of it.
My suspicion is that in the time before digital and everyone shot on film, most people were just really bad at taking photos ~ people used 35mm point-and-shoot, disposable cameras, 110 cameras, and similar. The general population weren't photographers and weren't using film to it's full potential - as a result, they got tons and tons of bad photos. Modern digital cameras (including those in phones) have great auto features for proper exposure, etc... and it's easy to delete bad photos (out of focus, too dark, etc...). I'm inclined to believe that most people's poor opinion of film is conflating the medium (film vs digital) with the camera experience (manual & confusing vs automagic).
There was recently a post here on HN about how the internet killed bad photos [1]. I made a similar comment at the time [2].
Right. Most people's experience of film is cheap film, micro formats like 110 and disc film, fast film they needed for poor quality or disposable cameras, etc.
Then collectively our cultural experience of black and white film in particular is of photojournalism, and popular culture's long-term obsession with the allure of the grainy photo; grain suggests interpretations like "immediate", "thrilling", "illicit", "secretive", or "exposé", so it becomes the dominant experience of a film photograph.
These things add up to people not really understanding what film is capable of.
(edited because I mangled my argument with grammar)
My impression is that automatic exposure has also gotten a lot better, although it's been a long time since I've done film. Cameras have also gotten a lot better at shooting in low light.
Yep. Digital cameras allow the opportunity to use the entire sensor to analyse the scene for metering.
In DSLRs the metering improvement is largely due to high-res pattern/matrix metering (simplified scene recognition with a few hundred or a thousand metering cells in a grid).
These metering modes were also in the final run of great consumer film SLRs.But I suppose compared to the sales of digital cameras, relatively few people experienced this in the film era; film compact cameras were largely using centre-weighted metering cells, and many people incorrectly perceived SLR cameras as "difficult".
My suspicion is that in the time before digital and everyone shot on film, most people were just really bad at taking photos ~ people used 35mm point-and-shoot, disposable cameras, 110 cameras, and similar. The general population weren't photographers and weren't using film to it's full potential - as a result, they got tons and tons of bad photos. Modern digital cameras (including those in phones) have great auto features for proper exposure, etc... and it's easy to delete bad photos (out of focus, too dark, etc...). I'm inclined to believe that most people's poor opinion of film is conflating the medium (film vs digital) with the camera experience (manual & confusing vs automagic).
There was recently a post here on HN about how the internet killed bad photos [1]. I made a similar comment at the time [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28987554
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28989625