Gens, i don’t need to do a test to know that this crop from a 6x9cm transparency is going to be substantially better than any FF digital that currently exists. this is why i stopped using 35mm film altogether (except when i needed to shoot slides of my artwork for documentary purposes, or needed some family snap or to document my latest big fish…)by the late ’80′s—35mm was too poor for my purposes. i started shooting 4×5 but then switched down to 6×9 because it was “good enough”. really, we should all be shooting 8×10 or larger, but we are all too lazy or broke.
you have set up a straw man argument here. we can’t currently run a fair test because there are no comparable digital systems. the best FF cameras today can only approach, and not really reach, 645 film results. really, this test with 645 film vs. 6×9 film would still be a blowout.