Nivard, I have scanned a bunch of various kinds of images: photos, computer generated images and drawings. My experience tells me that the format used to save the scan is most important I am now using a Brother MFC 495CW all-in-one for my scanning. It gives me the option of choosing B&W or Color and setting the resolution. Photos have inherently more detail than our usual scan, so setting the Dots per inch is important. 200 DPI can give fair results, but I usually use 300 DPI. I save as .TIF because, while TIF files are large they can be blown up without losing detail. JPG files, on the other hand, while small, are known as "lossy" that is, they get pixelated when enlarged a lot. But I can't scan negatives with the Brother. I have an old HP scanner with an attachment for scanning negatives. There I used essentially the same settings as with the Brother. Unfortunately the HP is OLD and will not run with WIN7. I have an old XP machine that will run the HP. So far I seem to get equal result scanning in color or B&W. I would think the more bits the better. But...I used some modern "Black and White" film that is developed like color film, (not the old fashioned microdol way like I did in the basement when I was a teenager) and when the negs were scanned it turned out the black is really sort of dark greenish not real black. Had to abandon that method. Hope this helps Good luck Dan