Digital BW, The Print

Here's another of the many ways to convert color images to B+W - But you have to shoot 
digital in the Raw file mode.

This Russell Brown technique seems very powerful.

Go to the below link and click on "dr. brown's photo styler" It's a Quicktime movie.

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=131

Basically you open a raw image in Photoshop's Camera Raw and use the Calibration sliders 
in the Advanced tab and play with all the sliders until you like the look. You then can save 
multiple settings for future use.