Quote Originally Posted by Doremus Scudder View Post
... I know photographers who develop their black-and-white film for scanning to a much lower contrast gradient than would work well for traditional darkroom printing, claiming that the lower-contrast negatives scan better. That's fine unless you ever want to make darkroom prints...
All known to me film scanners feature the hardware (optical system and ADCs) capable of scanning color positive films. With the base density of negative and positive film being relatively equal, the DMax of modern color positive films well exceeds the DMax of any negative film (color or B&W) , hence the scanners hardware (ADC) is always underutilized when scanning negatives. Developing "their black-and-white film for scanning to a much lower contrast gradient than would work well for traditional darkroom printing" would make matters even worse as all the contrast expansion required for "digital" visualization (screen and prints) will be done past the hardware chain, by "stretching" scanned values mathematically in scanners software and/or editing programs like PS.