There is one big difference that makes shooting film incomparable to shooting digital even if you print and scan: highlight rolloff. Think of each of your digi

There is one big difference that makes shooting film incomparable to shooting digital even if you print and scan: highlight rolloff. Think of each of your digital camera sensor pixels as a cell containing an integer value, between 0 and let’s say 16383. During exposure time, it collects photons and accumulates its value based on how much light hits this particular pixel. While it’s close to zero, it’s strongly affected by noise floor (which is subject to numerous factors, including e.g. sensor heating up, and can affect pixels unevenly across the sensor). However, once it reaches 16383, it clips—which is a binary threshold after which the pixel is pure color (green, blue or red) and basically contains no useful information at all. By contrast, as light hits your negative film it more or less chemically “burns” it into black, with no such binary threshold. (Paradoxically, on very low level, negative film is in some ways more “binary” than digital sensor—in that it consists of tiny halide crystals, each of which is either activated or not—but since they are layered, smaller, and as more crystals are activated each subsequent photon is less likely to hit an unactivated crystal, statistics play out such that thinking of it as burning light into shades of varying darkness is a useful mental shortcut.) When you develop film, it gets inverted and you get highlights smoothly fading into white, and it matters even after you print and scan. A scene of any contrast becomes a tricky balancing act with digital—you really don’t want to blow out the bright parts, which are often small yet attention-grabbing (hence the most important advice for digital photographers is “underexpose to be safe and pull up as you convert to display-referred space”), but you also don’t want to keep the majority of the scene too close to noise floor. In this sense, film is much more forgiving and better suited for aesthetically pleasing yet casual in-the-moment shots.