Good eye, but I vote for film rather than trying to make digital look like film. My X100 comes on Wednesday and I'll give color digital another try. I do intend on trying some high ISO raw converted to monochrome.
I too would 'vote' for film if it were that simple. If you look at my NYC gallery on my website, that's all Tri-X in a Bessa-L. My reality now is that I shoot a lot, and like to share. I shoot far too much just for fun than I could keep up with for processing in my sink, and obviously having a lab do it has cost considerations. I had to ask myself, what do I like more? Photography, or Tri-X? Photography won.
And as for the look, faking the boarders and grain have 2 real utilities for me:
#1. The 'surface' if you will of digital is very smooth, and sometimes texture will cover up this smoothness. Any digital artifacts, or even shortcomings of bad lenses, can be nullified with a little grain. Plus I find that it makes skin tones look great. 400 speed film was always great for portraits for this reason.
#2. The black boarder is a great end point to my images. If I ever blow out a highlight, the black boarder is better than no boarder. It keeps the eye IN the image, at least in my experience.
And if I think back to when film was king, photographers then did all kinds of little effects. Anything to add some kind of interest or 'edge' to their portfolio. Cross processing, Polaroid, especially Polaroid Type 55, and actual film edges then were more or less cool image making tricks of the trade.
While it's true that the boarder and the grain here are essentially fake, they're not gaudy. It's not like I'm putting a Type 55 boarder on a color image (seen that done, not pretty). I'm really just trying to do digitally what I like to do with film. So that's my case for my digital B&W post processing scheme.
Color images are coming, and for the record, I'm using Color Efex on those too. Their Portra NC simulators are off though, way too contrasty for Portra NC films.
