Unfortunately, the letter mentioned in the Dpreview thread was a little belligerent in its tone. The mag is wrong to exclude digital capture, in my view, but none of us will get them to change their minds by being rude or agresive to them in correspondence with them.
The digital ban would presumably extend to scan back images, whose resolution is exceptional and at least the equal of 4x5 film, which illustrates how crazy it is.
On the issue of stock file sizes, a lot of buyers just want to run an image at 1/8 or 1/4 page, and then ask for the file to be sent over as a compressed jpeg, by email. In that context, a 3mp point and shoot image will have sufficient resolution, and again, we post max repro sizes based on our experience on Barleigh Stock specifically to guide potential buyers of the max size an image will reproduce at with good detail. That size may be greater than the pixel count suggests in the case of a good sharp digital image. It seems ridicuous not to make a great image available simply because the file size is too small for it to cover the side of a truck, if it is good enough for, say, A4.
Quentin