Scanning a print should be a last resort. If you don't know why yet, just look at a "good" print under a low-powered magnifyng glass: it's mush. It doesn't retain what a negative does. A print looks good at the size of the print. Which means yep, you can sniff it and it should still look good because the final arbiter is just your vision. So sure, if you intend to print digitally, smaller than the print you copìed, then fine, just as long as your equipment and technique is good, nobody will know your little secret!
Making copies, entirely within a traditional b/w darkroom workflow, always led to the same problem of increased contrast unless you knew how to make a flatter intermediate that would then end up giving a print looking more normal at the end of the process. (Colour copying used special colour emulsions for the task.)
As for in-camera exposures: I use two old digitals - a D200 and a D700 - mostly the D200 because I like the effect of the 50mm and 180mm lenses on that format, and simply go for auto ISO using the Matrix system. Only exceptions are shooting against windows from inside a room. Photoshop handles that Matrix measuring just fine. Before you throw your hands up in horror, I have been a pro since '60 and did very nicely, thank you, both in b/white and transparency work; I'm not coming here just based on theory. In my b/w darkroom, I used only one film developer (D76 1+1 with water) and for papers, D163. Period. The trick was not to play games, but to standardise and learn how your very few films would work for you. 6x6 was always TXP 120, and nothing else except Ektachrome 64. Neg colour was almost never used in my commercial advertising work - very few folks wanted colour prints! For 135 format, I did not use Kodak b/w film at all, liking Ilford's 125 and 400 ASA emulsions more. Almost all my 135 format colour was on Kodachrome; if time was of the essence, I shot 6x6 Ektachrome and got it processed locally.
I did all my b/white prints in-house and only farmed out 40" x 60" display stuff for department stores or exhibition stands; I couldn't handle that size of print.
Now, I have also discoverd that some other popular (photographic) myths are also popular fallacies. Scanning Kodachromes on my CanoScan lets me make damned nice black/white prints or monitor images. According to most of the online pundits, this should not happen. So what am I doing wrong? ;-)
Wet prints from film changed as you were making them: the final print in the wash invariably lookd better than the print coming off the dryer. Unglazed prints on glossy paper look awful but always better than any I saw on textured papers, which I have always thought of as camouflage for rotten work.
A digital print doesn't look like a wet one either, because it isn't the same physical thing, which should be blindingly obvious. A wet print has a look that I prefer, perhaps because of my lifetime making wet prints, but also because at the end of it all, a wet print feels honest. I know what can be done in making wet prints, and I also know what can be done in the making of digital images. Part of the digital problem stems, I firmly believe, from something stated by others either here or in the OLP: folks with no darkroom history don't know how good a wet print can be made to look, how damned rich its flavour. And the same folks may also not be aware of the deadly influence of going on and on making minute adjustments to a file until you get so bored with it you could scream. That's where the "honesty" thing comes into play: knowing when to stop.
Just as in writing.
;-)
Rob C