I think you are both saying the same thing, non?
Maybe, but I'm not sure.
As I understand it, what RobC said is something akin to
"for a given ppi, a bigger monitor will show more image details than a smaller one (assuming the image has enough resolution)", which is something more about spatial resolution than "tone resolution".
My doubt was more about "tone resolution", that is the ability of large format film to resolve more tones (not just more details).
As I understand it, what the development process does is to "propagate" the chemical changes from the exposed molecules to the unexposed ones.
And as I understand it, this process is necessary because very few light-sensitive molecules get struck by photons.
If all the above is correct, a film can be seen as a set of binary samples
(where "binary" means "just two states") of an image: each light-sensitive molecules is either exposed or not esposed.
So I'm supposing that a large format film has more samples of an image, and therefore can resolve both more details and more tones.
I tried the following experiment:
1) I took and 2048x3029 JPG (original_image.jpg)
2) I converted it to a 1 bit image (that is, pixel can only be black or white, no grays) (just_1bit_convertion.gif)
3) I reloaded the original image, resized at 25% and converted to a 1 bit image (resize25_and_1bit_conversion.gif)
As you can see, the just_1bit_convertion.gif has (or looks to have) both more details and more tones than the resize25_and_1bit_conversion.gif.
I don't know if this test is meaningful in any ways, but that's the best examples I came up with.
By the way, both what I'm saying and what RobC is saying are strongly correlated.