My absolute favorite black and white film from Kodak, Plus-X Pan Professional, has been discontinued. Fine enough grain but rich contrast in the shadows, actually throughout the tonal range and just a beautiful emulsion. So many of my well known portraits were on Plus-X. Ilford FP4 is pretty close, but T-Max100 developed in T-Max developer and drum scanned is just fabulous. And then Tri-X is a film with such a great tonal range and perfect for hand held street photography, environmental portraits and times when you're using an orange or red filter and need the extra speed. I love shooting Tri-X in a Holga or Diana with a Red 25A filter taped over the lens. The red filter absorbs three stops of light and makes the Holga give you an almost perfect exposure in sunlight.
No scanner, not even the most expensive drum scanners deliver the resolution that they advertise but some are better than others, and the person operating the scanning actually does make a difference. I've had two, well, three drum scanners starting with a Howtek 4500 and now using a Howtek Hi-Resolve 8000 and generally scan all 35mm film either at 4000 ppi or 8000 ppi if it happens to be a super fine grained and shot with a sharp lens. 120 film is generally scanned at 4000 ppi, or about 650 mb's for a 16bit per channel RGB scan. 4x5's either at 4000, 2667 or 2000 ppi. Drum scanners only scan at specific resolutions that are defined primarily by the size of the rotating aperture wheel behind the lens. The wheel doesn't rotate during the scan, only moves when you tell it to, when you're setting up the scan. And I mention this because it matters when you're scanning color negs to override the auto aperture settings and choose a larger aperture setting that matches the grain structure of the color neg film. Most drum scanner operators still don't know how to do this and is a big part of why their scans usually suck.
It's also possible, if you have a hi-res digital camera and a good macro lens, to copy your film and make pretty good scans that way.
