Yet, it is difficult to compare to film days because grain size and quality was the same whatever the size of the sheet of film. So a larger piece of film did automatically contain more useful information.
In the digital world the resulting image quality can be described as a combination of number of pixels and their quality.
Smaller sensors can have as many pixels as larger ones. ...
So the nagative impact of smaller capturing device is probably overall significantly less with digital than it was with film, especially at lower ISOs.
Good observations.
As a side-note, there is one place where larger formats have rather consistently matched smaller formats for pixel size, which is 35mm vs the various digital medium formats. But then in most cases the sensor technology has been different (interline CCD or CMOS in 35mm vs full frame type CCD in MF). So we are about to get about as close as we have ever been to digital cameras in different formats using roughly the same "digital emulsion": Sony Exmor CMOS sensors in 36x24mm and 44x33mm, and probably in even larger formats in a while. To battle, and may the best lenses win!
