One of the issues that comes up a lot in the Pentax Talk forum is the much-lambasted topic of “exposure latitude”…. how much range from dark to light can a digital camera (the *ist-D in particular) grab compared to $other_camera_or_system.
Someone posted about this again tonight and one of the responses pointed to Is slide better, which is a decent page with some examples set up to compare slides to negatives to digial.
My thoughts (beaten into me over and again by dad 🙂 is that it’s the story you tell with the pictures, not if they are soft, unfocused, or don’t capture that extra .01 stop of shadow detail. Of course, as I pointed out last night, sometimes it would be nice to have a camera that would capture the range that your eyes can see of dark and light details (without post-processing that is 🙂 Oh, it’d also be nice to get a BMW for $0.25.