'documentary quality' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe something that has been produced, such as a film or photo, and whose level of quality is similar to that found in a documentary. For example: "The photos taken by the photographer had a documentary quality, capturing perfectly the atmosphere of the event."
They are a slightly misleading introduction to Hergé's work, which typically has a more documentary quality and dispatches Tintin to solve mysteries in exotic locales.
At the same time, there's a documentary quality to books like "Palestine" and "Safe Area Gorazde" that is often more effective and affecting than "real" documentary.
Published in 1847, Anne Brontë's first novel has a documentary quality, being based on her experiences of working as a governess (at the time the only respectable occupation available to unmarried women of reduced circumstances).
That quick, visibly pasted-together kind of artifice is the obverse of the medium's documentary quality: there is the literalness of reportage, and there is the literalness of blatant, candid (but far from guileless) artificiality.
Stakeout on Dope Street, the story of three teenagers who find some packs of uncut heroin and try to peddle it, was a tightly edited, gritty drama, given a documentary quality by the photography of Haskell Wexler (using the pseudonym Mark Jeffrey, the names of his two sons), and the direction of Kershner.
Sometimes she and her fellow guards posed alongside their abused wards, but most of her photos from Abu Ghraib have a purely documentary quality — solitary prisoners, stripped and manacled in their cells, stretched over bed frames or forced to balance on a box.
He was both, a restlessly inquisitive but painstaking scholar whose wide-ranging interests embraced the cultural resurgence of late Byzantium, the literary (as opposed to documentary) qualities of Byzantine saints' lives, the editing of Byzantine texts, and the history and culture of Ukraine, which he addressed in the book "Ukraine Between East and West" (1996).
The New York composer William Duckworth, author of "20/20: 20 New Sounds of the 20th Century" (Wadsworth, 1999), praised the site's documentary qualities, calling it "the equivalent of a sonic photo wall, where people's emotions about the tragedy are translated into sound and hung on the Web".
One might say it has certain… documentary qualities.
The documentary qualities of those two artists are complemented by the overtly autobiographical mixed medium display by Baltimore filmmaker Matt Porterfield Hamiltonon," "Putty Hill"), who is represented by a wall-mounted grid of photos of his own everyday life taken by his cellphone.
Bin Laden's media operation now produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and mobile phone video.
