Digital BW, The Print

Dear all:

I recently gave an enormous jump. After asking for your wise opinion on sca=
nners, I 
decided to buy a Nikon 5000. I could not find a reliable 8000 and the 9000 =
is too 
expensive.

I am, thus, back to film. DSLR is good, but, to my mind, unsatisfactory whe=
n it comes to 
resolve big tonal gaps. And, ça va de soi, when it comes to print the resul=
t. I will use it 
sometimes. In fact, I used it yesterday to make portraits of one of our vis=
iting novelists, 
but I also took film cameras, both with Portra 160NC. Although I wanted the=
 portraits to 
be in B&W, DSLR made me change my visualization techniques: with the DSLR y=
ou have to 
shoot color, and you only think in BW when you are in front of the computer=
.

Now that I am back to film, I am wonderig whether I should keep this techni=
que or go back 
to thinking in BW from the very beginning. When I make BW out of color film=
 (both 
negatives and slides), I find the result a bit flat, lacking of tonal range=
. Maybe I am not 
using the right technique to do it (either Photoshop Grayscale or TheImagin=
gFactory 
Convert to BW pro). I have also noticed that scanning BW negatives is not n=
ecessarily an 
easy task.

Is there a good idea about what is the best film (BW, BW for C41, color to =
convert...) to get 
a good, full tonal range picture in this conditions?

Thank you very much
J