Originally posted by rawr The 'imperfections' debate throws up a number of interesting issues.
One perspective on the issue is that many of those film era lenses were not imperfect themselves, but were instead simply let down by the limitations of film - the chemistry of it, the uneven way it lay in the camera, the way it was processed and printed. Now, in the era of high resolution digital sensors, those old lenses are finally able to show their true capabilities without film getting in the way.
Film and digital don't resolve light in quite the same way. Film picks up light no matter the angle of incidence, while digital has more and more problems as the angle of incidence increases. There have been particular cameras that were highly susceptible to this issue in the corners - the NEX-7 in particular was known to have severe resolution issues, some Leica bodies had quite the color shift, etc. But in general this problem hits all digital sensors to one degree or another.
Telecentric lenses, where the optical center of the lens is placed at infinity, tend to do the best. Wide angle lenses often do quite poorly, because they need to be retrofocus. And on the flip side, a lens that produces some abberations that are baked into the image on film can be easily corrected on digital. So a lens can actually be a great performer on film but terrible on digital, and vice versa.
As such I don't think we can uniformly say that film lenses as a whole will do better or worse. It all depends on how susceptible this sensor system (sensor, filters, microlenses, etc) will be to that particular issue, as well as how much the lens in question induces the problem. Digital correction is certainly a good thing, but it's not trivial to apply corrections in just the corners tailored to the abberations of a particular sensor and lens, as opposed to across the whole frame.
As an aside, the Sony A7R-II reportedly made huuuuge leaps in resolving this issue. I don't own one and I haven't been keeping up that much since the pre-release reviews, but word was that it was pretty much fixed. Pentax is rumored to be using the A7R-II sensor in their new body. That doesn't necessarily mean they'll still have the same microlenses and stuff on top of it, but it's a good sign.