Digital BW, The Print

Question...after two snip & copies - 

...The point of this is to use the 24 bit mode and put the lines at 
different points to smooth out the transition. I'm not a fan of 8-bit 
adjustments (or the non-partitioning workflow if a 4-ink printer is 
being used) because they result in more visible artifacts...
snip from Paul Roark I believe?

...(off list snip from Ron Harris webpage cited earlier, I liked 
reading that)
...Software: My choice for a digital darkroom program is the standard 
one, Adobe Photoshop.  Once the image is scanned into Photoshop, it 
consists of a bed of pixels.  If the resulting image is an '8-bit' 
image, each pixel will be one of 256 shades of gray.  A "12-bit" 
image would have pixels with 4,096 possible shades of gray.  These 
shades of gray, of course, make up the tones in the image.  If the 
pixels are small enough, then the image appears to be continuous.  
The printer cannot generally make use of 4,096 shades of gray, but 
having this much information in the file while working with the image 
until it's ready for printing helps to keep the image from being 
degraded as it is manipulated in Photoshop...<end snips> 

BACK TO THE QUESTION given this 'info'...When I bring something into 
photoshop 5.2 IT won't let me utilize most of the controls other than 
levels in 16 bit mode...so if you must immediately convert to 8-bit 
to manipulate why bother scanning higher??? Especially if chances are 
256 greys are going to do it any way since the printer range is maxed 
out?

Tbanks Cleavis
(whose fav book often is "Questions of Hu") :-)