Shooting Black & White

B/W straight out of camera

desaturated color image

I'm considering shooting part of a new documentary in black&white and am weighing the cons and pros of shooting black and white or shooting color and making it B/W in postproduction.

An obvious advantage of shooting color is the fact that you can decide later to go color or B/W. But I would think that shooting B/W would produce a better image for 2 reasons:

1. hardware and software work together to produce the same image
2. it's always better to shoot with final output in mind

On the other hand, I've read that the sensor is a color sensor and the processor turns it into B/W. In that case, you might as well shoot color. If you had a 'dedicated B/W sensor' it would be a different thing...

Here's a guy who's produced an interesting B/W image. The only drawback is that it requires you to shoot in EX Tele mode (100% zoom) on the GH2. With the APS-C crop-factor you need a wildly wide lens to be able to shoot indoors... But it's an interesting experiment: