Tonality comes up in discussions quite often, especially when comparing dSLRs to MFDBs, or digital to film. Although it's almost always implied to be a quantitative, objective term, it seems to be used to differentiate between different formats based on qualitative, subjective observations. I'm always suspicious of such hand-waving which reeks of intellectual dishonesty, and am struggling to understand what people really mean when they use that word.
Online searches don't help much: some sources say it is dynamic range, some say it is the contrast curve, or local contrast or microcontrast (which is another vague term), and others say it's the combination of brightness and contrast.
If tonality is DR, then we can easily go to DXOMark site and compare the DR of cameras to determine which one has higher tonality and be done with it (I'll ignore criticisms of their methodology as that's not pertinent to the topic). Comparing film to digital gets a bit more complex due to the linearity of digital, but I'm sure some theorist has done the math already.
If it has something to do with contrast possibly combined with brightness, shouldn't it be a matter of having the right curve, shoulder. If that's the case, it's a highly subjective term and I don't see why a 15 megapixel point&shoot frame couldn't achieve the same curve ("tonality") as a pixel-binned 15 megapixel Phase One 65+ - a rather ludicrous proposition even I admit.
Or is tonality a mainly subjective term which would not withstand a double-blind study of the end results - sadly lacking on photography review sites. That's how I look at it: my 6x6 film photos have much higher "tonality" (as I currently understand it) than my crop sensor dSLR shots, but I'm not at all sure if I could pinpoint the difference in tonality from other people's work.
So, what is tonality?