T-Max films are quite beautiful especially when developed in XTOL developer. What I like about about T-Max 400 is that the straight line of the curve travels up seemingly forever. It does not seem to shoulder out. There is detail in the highlights even with overexposure. No more burning in highlights only to get dull grey tones!
www.4photolab.com
I found out last night through actually making up the powder (after 5 months of putting off mixing up 5 litres of it) That TMAX 400 in ID-11 at 1+3 rated at 400 and exposed for the shadows with adjustment for heavy highlights gives great tonal quality. Plus works out incredibly cheap on processing about 17 pence per 4 sheets (30 cents)
Enjoy.
I'll post a sample when I'm not in work.
I've found pushed TMY, even stand developed in XTOL, very capable of producing highlights that have detail, but are well beyond the reach of a CCD scanner, even a Polaroid 120, which has a much less collimated light source than the LED Nikons. That, probably more than LF, was what led to me buying a drum scanner.
Drum scanners can see further into dense highlights because a PMT intrinsicly has a lot more dynamic range than a CCD. Not the "bit-counting" dynamic range nonsense scanners manufacturers like to advertise, but actual range between the brightest and darkest things resolvable.
The drum scanner is also mechanically dead-accurate, the Polaroid took me two returns to get one that was even vaguely mechanically accurate, and it still wasn't really right--it had color misregistration that came and went in regular intervals during the scan. Even scanning color and only using one channel thin diagonal lines were noticably wavy. If you scanned fine-grained b&w as normal grayscale (combining all three colors) you could watch the grain come and go in bands.
Drum scanners have gotten seriously cheap, I got a great Screen 1045ai for a little past $2000 a couple of years ago (over $50k new in 1995), I'm guessing they're even cheaper now.
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