Digital BW, The Print

> Agreed.  But you'll never get really good black 
 > and white from any RGB imaging device.

There's no reason why that should be true.    Scanning black and 
white film should produce flawless grayscale images.  Why wouldn't 
it?   What is lost?   If you scan T-Max or Tri-X the shape of the 
curve should be the same for all three channels, with just a 
translation applied due to the film base color.  So pick the one 
with the best s/n.    

I agree that digital cameras are another story, because they are 
only giving you their best guess of what the grayscale scene looked 
like, based on reconstructing it from the separate elements in a 
Bayes array.   So a digital camera really just gives you a good 
guess.     Hopefully even this problem would go away if Foveon ever 
comes up with a >3MP version of their chip and straightens out some 
of the S/N differences in the channels.