Colour or Mono Scanning?

Busy week in the world of photo scanning, so I've spent all day feeding photos into our s1220. Today's job has been a mix of colour and black and white photos. Some are quite recent, and well cared for, many are old and poorly. Such a chunk of photos poses a bit of a dilemma. As a photo scanning service we want to give a clients the best service, and one of our most popular features is image recovery, the ability to boost faded colours. Now, if you follow the details of the Kodak operating manual you'll be aware that monochrome images can be scanned either as a single channel, or as RGB three channel colour images (albeit the 'colour' being monochrome). If you scan B&W as greyscales you'll save some space, and maybe even scan a bit quicker (but from the evidence of today any speed gain is marginal). However you can't do much to boost the image once its scanned. I don't know the low level details of how the scanner treats greyscales but it does seem to do something to improve contrast as it scans. You can hit the boost button after scanning but it doesn't do much, if anything. The results of my subjective experience today is that its much better to scan everything as colour. Then you can apply the colour restore, and get a kick out of how much better the post scanning images look.