While I’m all with you when it comes to your subjective perception about the different appearance, I only wanted to point out that these differences essentially don’t lie in the fact that one information is analog on film and the other one is digital but that the differences are caused by other things. The sensors in electronic cameras have quite a different characteristic compared to film chemics, I certainly give you that. But that has nothing to do with the digitalisation process itself.
And yes, the DNA consists of 4 bases which perfectly fits the definition of being digital as long as we’re talking about discreet values. Digital doesn’t necessarily mean binary, another very common misconception - it’s just the most prominent variant.
Other digital sets are:
English alphabet (26 values)
ISDN: (3 values)
Chinese: (several thousand)
Doesn’t matter, by definition any limited character set can be losslessly converted to any other base, hence it can be mathematically proven that digital data doesn’t have to be binary.
To summarise that: your observation in practise is correct but you’re drawing the wrong conclusion about what causes it as digitalising something while sticking to the rules of Nyquist/Shannon certainly doesn’t take any “life” out of anything.
That’s all.