Digital BW, The Print

Techpan is excellent, but when developed in Photographer's Formulary 
TD-3 you can rate at 80-100 asa so it isn't *that* slow.  I don't 
find T400CN or Portra 400BW to be anything near TP... Tmax 100 
possibly, but nowhere near as sharp.

I think you need to have a better understanding on how to convert to 
b&w before you can judge a color film for this task though.  You can 
mimic a film's response to color very well if you tweak the Channel 
Mixer and color curves while converting to b&w instead of just using 
a "big button" approach.

I don't using color film for b&w because I prefer ISO 400 and I don't 
like the resulting grain from color films of this speed.  T400CN 
works very well for scanning (but you still have to work with curves 
to get it to appear like a traditional silver emulsion film).

Read some more tutorials on converting color to b&w.

mark

PS  My workflow: layers: Curve Adjust and Channel Mixer, work both 
with preview until I am happy.  RGB color curves give complete 
variable control over each channel and the channel mixer linearly 
blends them down to b&w.  Takes about a minute and *you* control the 
entire process.

...
> > Is there a good idea about what is the best film (BW, BW for C41,
> > color to convert...) to get a good, full tonal range picture in 
this
> > conditions?
> 
> Film choices are often a matter of pure personal preference.  I like
> Tri-X, except for the grain.  Technical Pan is superb, but it is so 
slow
> that it can't be used in many situations.  Kodak Portra 400BW is 
very
> good for shooting contrasty scenes, especially night scenes, and the
> grain is so extraordinarily fine and the resolution so high that it 
is
> almost a poor man's Tech Pan--plus it is quite fast, at ISO 400.