soundwave05 said:
Digital 24P is not as high resolution as 35mm film.
The CCD chips are still not big enough to create a picture which is directly comparable to film.
Digital is used mostly right now for convienance sake or by a lot of low-budget productions. For Star Wars it lets the special effects guys insert effects a bit easier, so I guess it's a convienance thing.
I still don't like how it looks in comparision to the Star Wars films shot on film.
I think some of that depends on who you believe. Film is a chemically dependant format, where you'll make a lot of decisions based on what you're shooting: darkness, subtle light, fast action, something more still.. and you'll appropriate film type/ISO, shutter speed and so forth appropriately. There are optical effects to these choices - like change in depth of field, motion blur or lack of, noise etc. Digital, as you already pointed out eliminates many inconveniences. Outside of the cost of good 24P cameras, it also costs a fraction of what film production costs. There's virtually no noise either when output with a digital projector. For large theatres film will probably still look great for a very long time, but with home formats imparticular (which is where the bulk of movie business cash is made these days) the resolutions in digital film suffice. In fact, they're largely tailored to those resolutions. 35mm is only digitised to these native resolutions anyway.
As for Star Wars: I think part of the reason Star Wars Episode II seems unreal or cartoony to a lot of people is because they've watched traditional film all of their lives that come with traditional grain/noise. Its true that 35mm is a dense high resolution medium, but it's based on photosensitive chemicals that now, can barely change. The future is in electronic sensors capturing information. In a matter of a couple of years Lucasfilm has upgraded from 2.2 million pixel digital cameras on Clones, to 10 million on Revenge of the Sith. This can go as far as processing can go fast, and chip refabrication can make small.
I think this is why 35mm film is still being used now, but also why Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Rodriquez are either interested in where digital film is going or are actively pushing/using it already.