Digital BW, The Print

What's the consensus of opinion on which "intent" to use for b&w 
printing? I've heard arguments in favor of "Perceptual" without black 
point compression. Still, others suggest using Relative Colormetric. 
Over the past while, I've experimented with both using different matte 
papers and having found much of a difference for monochrome printing.

Have you?

Some third party workflows like QTR will have their own instructions
for which intent to use, but for a native driver and ink setup, I
wouldn't lose sleep over which to use. The main function of a
rendering intent is to determine how out of gamut document colors are
handled by the printer. If you're printing grayscale, or even tints
and split tones, exceeding printer gamut should not really be an
issue.
-- 
amadou diallo
Author, Mastering Digital Black and White
www.masteringdigitalbwbook.com

Perceptual intent squeezes the entire source space to fit within gamut, 
this includes black point. Relative with black point compression 
squeezes the source space to fit with in the black point, and any other 
out of space colors to fit within the gamut. For black and white there 
isn't much difference unless you have a cetain mid gray tone that must 
be reproduced faithfully (not compressed). If you want the full tone of 
the image to fit on the full tone of the paper, perceptual is often the 
best choice (but not always). There really are no hard and fast rules 
for these things, a lot of it has to do with how the image 
looks "best", and it may take a print in each intent to find 
that "best".