I'm glad you enjoyed the article!

No, I didn't use a filter but I did play around a little bit in post-production. I know it's cheating, but I just wanted to enhance the emotion in each image. For something that costs about $4, Kentmere 400 is incredible value but it's not quite on the level of Ilford HP5 (even though I think it's pretty much the same formula), so I just made the adjustments later on.

And yeah, I guess 'technically inferior' is a bit harsh as there's a lot of subjectivity involved in assessing images. While I think that digital cameras can depict reality more realistically than film cameras, film just has a more pleasing look