>>3049026I'm not avoiding it, I just didn't find the point worth addressing; anyone who can't work it out for themselves is too stupid to understand the explaination anyhow.
But for your edification, here goes:
>digi can capture x range of light to dark, for red green and blue, for any given exposure, and record it as 12/14/16 bit colour>film can capture y range of light to dark, in red green and blue, also cyan if it's Superia, or simply within a certain spectrum for b&w, and records it on a scale with effectively no fixed gradations, it is infinitely nuanced within it's working range, however it is much smaller in range than y, lets call it q>with digi, your output is a jpeg, it can show 8 bit colour. You choose how you want to stretch or compress x to plot along your jpegs 8 bit colour spectrum, but you can't fit more in than was there to begin with, and you can't fill in the gaps if you want to stretch out your original tonal range>y is much larger than x, but q fits inside x, so we can scan film with a digital camera. Yes, film compresses your data. the cam plots q along x, and breaks up what was infinitely nuanced there into a 16 bit scaleHey, it if fits inside, and we're breaking it up, doesn't that give us worse tonality than digital?!
>No. Digital takes a scene, and assigns each point it can see to the colour value it detects. Film takes a scene, and grows a silver crystal of the size it deems approprite for the amount of each colour it sees, and then uses that crystal to grow a dye cloud of a corresponding size and intensity for each colour. This being a physical, chemical process subjects it to a degree of variability. The clouds created at any one point are random within a certain range. This is called noise. This randomness creates beautiful organic gradations between colours and tones, as opposed to a hard break from 194, 45, 67 to 193, 45, 67, or even worse 194, 194, 194 to 193, 193, 193. 
