Hey Rodeo, to your question for roughly: do the results of old digital cameras compare favorably to new? Well, it depends.

"Look" in a digital format is a combination of the lens and the processing. The camera just contributes the RAW data, maybe a high(er) frames per second giving more possible frames to have that single great image. Otherwise, it comes down to how much data you can open up into your digital editor, more pixels at a deeper bit-depth being better than less.

The film to digital comparison is about 20MP for 35mm film in "resolution" and medium format film mapping roughly to 75MP sensors. So those old film prints were (are) actually superior in detail to DSLRs until relatively recently.

I'm not dismissing old equipment for simply being old. If the camera is perfect for the job, it's the right camera. But, most old digital cameras are just old, inferior, digital cameras. They have tiny digital sensors and miserable noise performance. The entry-level models have few external controls and even the old pro-level models have micro-size LCD screens. But, once the industry got into 16MP range, those cameras are as good as needed and their results are difficult to distinguish from cameras through the 24MP range, unless you need to crop into the details, where again, more is better.

As I've noted many times, the UHH community is mostly populated with a bunch of retirees with more time and money than sense. Keeping up with this bunch of Joneses is a fool's errand. I fell into this trap a bit when changing to the EOS 5DIII. But, I stopped that upgrade cycle there, now approaching 10 years ago. Cameras in this age and resolution now sell around $600 used, even with shutter usage sub 10K.

Coming back to your question I posted some 10MP to 22MP comparisons a few weeks ago, where for some comparison images, I prefer the 10MP result. Although looking at / re-editing old images is an enjoyable exercise, for me, I have no interest in handling that old camera.

https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-765086-1.html
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-765333-1.html

Great response, I never considered folks using iPhones as photographers. They may be capturing images and memories but they are not to my mind taking photographs.My first camera was a used German made SL film camera, of course that was 65 years ago and my Grandmother was taking pictures with an old Kodak box camera.
If you are just pressing the shutter and letting the camera do it's thing, are you really a photographer? I don't think Ansel Adams would think so, for Ansel the final product was created in the darkroom.

Great response, I never considered folks using iPhones as photographers. They may be capturing images and memories but they are not to my mind taking photographs.My first camera was a used German made SL film camera, of course that was 65 years ago and my Grandmother was taking pictures with an old Kodak box camera.
If you are just pressing the shutter and letting the camera do it's thing, are you really a photographer? I don't think Ansel Adams would think so, for Ansel the final product was created in the darkroom.