I’d go with the A57 if I were you,
I think Sony makes fantastic consumer cameras. I bought an A77, IMO it beats anything in it’s price range. Hope some of that helps!

If you’re talking about the 4×6 colour photos you send to the labs, those images are printed by machines that correct color casts, and because digitals take generally softer pictures, the film images need no sharpening.

If you just take a digital, some models, especially the pro digital SLRs, leave the image as original as possible, leaving all the editing to the person, which is what the pro wants. Nonetheless, to make great looking ditital prints requires an awareness of how to edit the photo afterwards and print properly – without the two, you cannot get rival images.

On the flipside, the editing power that is given to the hands of the photographer with digital greatly surpasses what as possible with film – once you give the image to the lab, its out of your hands. You can crop, clone, colour adjust your digital image any way you want, allowing the person who invests time in learning how to edit digital images the ability to work wonders on their image.

You also mention black and white. Traditional film b&w photography is generally the pervue of pro photographers. If you want to do a digital-film comparison, I have first hand experience in both.

I’ve developed and printed my own 35mm images for a little over a year, and have done digital for three, I’m sure there;s photogs with even more time under their belt.

What I concluded was that, when it comes to the final quality of the print, digital cannot surpass the feel and look of a fiber based or even an RC film print. Some paper textures used for film printing, I’ve searched high and low for a digital equivalent and heve never been satisifed.

Some prints, some type of photography, come out so well on film, I would be surprised if I would get a similar result in digital. Film has a wider latitude (can discern a greater amount of difference between extreme black and extreme white) than digital.

But I have only rudimentary experience in image manipulation in the wet darkroom. Dodging, burning, etc… all that comes so much more easier for me in the digital darkroom. I can achieve results that I could never do in film.

So in the end, each has its pluses and minuses. I find any view that definitively concludes one form is superior over the other is narrow and not taking into account each format’s individual strenths.