“The bottom line is that this kind of shot just does not have a great level of detail to record. Unless you are going to try to count individual hairs on your subject’s head, or blow the image up to billboard size, the benefits of film, even medium format film, are not obvious for this type of shot.”

I disagree.

Because humans are intimately acquainted with faces, they can easily perceive the differing levels of detail recorded by various media.

Show anyone, even a non-photographer, a portrait made with a Hasselblad and the same shot made with a smaller format camera and he or she will spot the differences immediately.

If the small camera is a DSLR the variations are even more obvious, due to digital’s inability to record the almost infinite microcontrasts making up facial texture.

Not so with other sorts of shots. Because we don’t stare at trees and leaves in the mirror every morning, we don’t actually know what they look like “in real life".

So our perception of accuracy is much less developed when looking at landscapes than when looking at people.