Digital BW, The Print

Unless I am missing something, my cameras are rated in RGB pixels 
just as my scanners are and after mixing down to gray scale I have 
the same amount of pixels as I started with... of course they are now 
scalar values instead of colorspace vectors.  The real way to look at 
this is that the sensors are throwing away a lot of b&w resolution to 
interpolate to RGB in the camera and *if* someone were to make a 
dedicated b&w digital camera using current sensors it would have much 
higher resolution than current color models.  I worked on a "special 
purpose" b&w digital camera which was amazing... ie. it would be easy 
for anyone to make one right now.  The biggest draw back to a 
dedicated b&w camera is that, just like film, it would have only one 
response to a full spectrum of visible light and filters would have 
to be used etc. etc.  Mixing RGB down to b&w gives you a lot of 
freedom when you are "processing" your images at the cost of 
resolution... of course, soon you will have more resolution than you 
will ever need and it won't matter if you are shooting a color 
sensor...

Sure, if you shoot Techpan you will get great scans... you will get 
great results even with a 2880ppi film scanner and 35mm... but even 
at 80 asa in TD-3 that is too slow for lots of stuff.  

mark

...
> > Yes.  The Nikon 8000 made a huge difference in my overall 
> workflow.  With
> > medium format Tech Pan I print at 22 x 28 inches in my 7500 with 
> Ultra Tone
> > inks and get essentially perfect images.  The sharpness holds up 
> even when
> > people get their noses into the print, and the image is virtually 
> grainless.
...
> > >... can a scanner get close to a high end digital camera these 
> days?
> > 
> > For B&W work, I think the question should be reversed.
> > 
> > Recall that the digital cameras use RGGB sensors, typically.  
Each 
> one of
> > those colors is called a "pixel" in the ads/resolution ratings.  
> With a
> > scanner, however, each pixel is a full RGB pixel (or grayscale 
> pixel).  So,
> > the B&W resolution of digital cameras is not as high as the 
> scanners' rated
> > resolution.  If, for example, I applied a "red filter" in the 
> computer to a
> > digital camera's "pixel," I'd have, effectively, 1/4 the rated 
> pixels.
...