This is a digital camera (essentially a video camera). The more frames per second, the smoother the action appears and the sharper the image looks. With that and the high dynamic range, which has been a problem with digital (hard to get an image with very bright areas and very dark areas that looks right), you get something that looks like film. Film is analog and so has incredible detail; my son says a good 35-mm film camera has resolution about 4 times as good as Blu-Ray. This approximates that quality without the big drawbacks of film: its vulnerability until it's processed, the problem with storing it safely once it is processed, and the difficulty of editing it.
These days even with film they do the editing digitally (scanning the pieces of film into digital storage and then
editing on a computer, which is hugely easier). But the physical film master still has to be physically cut together from the physical films of the various takes. That's automated now, but it's still much more cumbersome than having the entire process be digital from start to finish.
Even now, for most theaters a physical film reel has to be generated, printed off by thousands, and mailed to the theaters, which is all enormously expensive. Digital projection in theaters will eliminate that obstacle as well, once it's universal.
(I owe all this to my son in the business; mistakes and misconceptions are mine.
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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
