Digital BW, The Print

>  There is no advantage to scanning a b&w neg in RGB as the three
> channels (and hence the three times larger file) will be identical.
Vuescan allows you to make a greyscale file from any of the color 
channels.  I tried the default way, and then each of the various color 
channels.  The green channel with my Canon 9950F gave the most detail 
with the least noise for scanning BW silver negatives.  As such, I set 
Vuescan to make the grey 16 bit image from the green channel. This does 
not require having an RGB image, with the resultant huge file size. It's 
easy to test these things. Try each way. Make sure to label the file 
with an appropriate name.  Open them in Photoshop and compare.