Digital BW, The Print

Silverfast HDR is designed to manipulate 16-bit scans which have been 
scanned in Silverfast Ai. The purpose of the HDR scan is to preserve 
all the information from the negative in the scan and do the tonal 
manipulation at another step. For this reason, when you set 
Silverfast Ai to save the scan as an HDR scan, you cannot use any of 
the usual tools for image manipulation. 

I haven't used Silverfast HDR enough to comment on whether its better 
or worse than any other software. I usually scan in Silverfast Ai and 
obtain an HDR scan which I then manipulate in Photoshop. Once you've 
saved an HDR scan, there should be no reason to have to go back and 
rescan the negative. Also, there's an advantage to working with a 16-
bit scan as there's significantly less loss of image data. 

I hope that this helps. If you have any scanning questions, I'm sure 
that there are experts here who can answer them.

Evan