Digital BW, The Print

From one with 25+ years of conventional wet darkroom B&W experience 
in both 35mm and medium format, 2 months experience scanning and 
photoshoping negatives, and 6 months experience with digital 
cameras.....

Bottom line - today a real B&W scanned negative will beat a 6mp 
digital image by about 10%. With an 8mp camera the advantage drops to 
5%. With an 11mp camera the advantage is gone. By advantage I mean 
sharpness, resolution, and tone control.

Assuming: you have an excellent B&W negative from a very good 
camera/lens with perfect zone system control exposure, outstanding 
development chemistry, a top quality scanner, and tons of patience, 
experience and time to master negative scanning. Also assuming you 
are making prints bigger than 8x10. 

I studied negative scanning for months and followed hundred of 
Internet BBS discussions by people sharing techniques for overcoming 
the problems of scanning B&W negatives. All scanners are engineered 
to scan color and do a poor job with B&W (they don't do a very good 
job with color either), so people have come up with hundreds 
of "tips" on how to overcome the problems inherint in scanning 
negatives.

But the major roadblock for me was time. It takes forever to scan 
negatives. My brief experients with scanning B&W (and color) negs 
showed that no one process worked for all negs. Each neg required 
different settings to get the optimum scan. So, a 4 to 7 minute scan 
for the first attempt, followed by 2 or 3 more scans of the same neg 
to find the "sweet spot" followed by lots of photoshop time to clean 
up the dust spots and other small imperfections. Then you are at the 
starting point of a digital camera image where you can begin 
the "creative" process of adjusting tone, contrast, etc.

So I decided to put the scanner money into digital cameras instead, 
and have not regretted the decision. The scanner stays around for the 
low probablilty I will need to scan and print something from a 25 
year file of negatives.

But the digital camera B&W process has it's problems too. The biggest 
problem for me is too many choices. I've collected about 
7 "techniques" for converting the color digital image to B&W. That 
control, plus selective masking (dodging and burning) in Photoshop 
means I can review hundreds of "versions" of a B&W image in a few 
minutes. Sometimes I go crazy trying to decide. In the wet darkroom I 
could use a few different contrast filters and my magic wand for very 
limited dodging and burning to see 4 or 5 different versions of a 
print in a couple of hours.