Sorry - didn't mean to imply that you were starting a digital vs film thing, nor would I want to go down that silly road either. I shoot with both film (in a variety of formats) and with digital SLRs, enjoy both and see advantages and disadvantages to each as well. But your remarks did lead me to believe that you thought that web images from film scans would always be inherently inferior to 1st generation digital images and that's just not the case.
At web sizes, a well-done scan (good equipment, good technique) of a quality film image will generally be indistinguishable from a quality digital shot, especially with modern, fine-grained films. The same generally holds true of prints made from each, up to the size limits of that particular format. It's at the limits where digital and film differences begin to become most obvious, and it's where those limits are that cause endless (and generally pointless) internet debates.
[Nitpickers take note: I'm not saying that there aren't differences in shooting techniques and results - there are, but they tend to get over-stated and are not generally apparent to the average viewer. Differences will also be obvious in 100% pixel crops, but that's not how we view images, and such differences are generally over-hyped as a consequence.]
Here're two examples from my site - picked arbitrarily, as they just happen to be the first two images in the C&TS area. If you're C&TS savvy, you'll know which of these is originally digital and which film (scanned on a Nikon LS-50 filmscanner) - otherwise, I'd wager you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Image one
Image two
Since you're expressing an interest in film scanners, I'll also mention that I can make BETTER prints from properly scanned negative and transparency film than I could ever get optically. Particularly with transparency film, my Lightjet prints (high end printer which exposes traditional color photographic paper - RA-4 process - with lasers from a digital source file) are substantially improved over what I would get from custom lab Cibachrome/Ilfochrome transparency prints.
Scott
