Expecting the shaped tonality we've come to expect from film from a digital sensor will be a long road of disappointment. Lambasting digital for this reason is nonsensical, because
it's now up to the photographer to tune the rendering to suit.
To quote Pascal Dangin (from
The New Yorker):
“Photography as we knew it, meaning film and Kodak and all that, was a very subjective process. With film images you had emotions. You used to go out and buy film like Fuji, because it was more saturated, or you liked Agfa because it gave you a rounded color palette.” With a ten-dollar roll of film, he explained, you were essentially buying ten dollars’ worth of someone’s ideas. “Software, right now, is objective. ‘Let the user create whatever he wants.’ Which is great, but it doesn’t really produce good photography.”
This doesn't mean that digital is "bad", it just means that color work depends more fully on the photographer's skill and vision (and time and energy) with digital than it does with film. Top-flight color film printing also depends on a high degree of skill and vision, but digital loses that first step out-of-the-box tonality that some people miss. For those who embrace it, digital color work can be a new avenue to the challenges and joys of craft.
