[unfocussed_mike]

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)

[actuallyalys]

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.

[unfocussed_mike]

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".