Response to Advice: BW film/dev combo in the 100 & 400 range?

Your second mail got us closer to a possible answer: It may have nothing to do with film grain after all. I do quite a bit of neg and slide scanning. I noticed the problem you describe too. I first thought they were due to film grain but in fact it is "noise" created by the scanner. You definitly should check this possibility. It really looks like noticable film grain at first, but a lupe will tell you the difference. The limiting factor most often is not a medium speed film in 35mm, but the scanner, even if the hardware data sounds impressive. The good news: Most imaging programs will remove noise very effectively. Just find a button labelled "denoise" or something similar and see what you get. My Jenscan slide scanner definitly needs "denoising" and the results I have seen from other scanners also give me the impression that this ought to be a standard in post processing. This takes us to another point: Noise was not the main problem I encountered with scanned negs. It often is missing acutance, which is often amplified by using low acutance films such as TMAX etc. If you are going to scan negs you should try to get as much visible acutance as possible. For this reason I cannot recommend using super fine grain developer formulations, but decend acutance enhancing developers, such as R09 (as mentioned above).

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