I have a very nice darkroom downstairs that is now basically retired in place. I have not actually dismantled it yet, but that will probablky happen soon (wine cellar?). Even after switching entirely to digital for shooting, and buying a scanner for my color slides, I maintained the darkroom for my 50 year collection of color and black and white negatives.

Then I bought a scanner for my negatives. It very quickly became clear to me that I could get far better results from scanning the negatives and processing them through Photoshop than I could printing them in the darkroom. I am very satisfied with the 11x14 black and white digital prints. The ability of Photoshop to deal with contrast and shadow issues was far superior to anything I could do in the darkroom, not to mention sharpening. The digitized prints are far superior than the prints that came out of my dark room.

That said, your mileage may vary. I was never a particularly skilled darkroom technician. So clearly somebody who was better trained, more skilled, and more patient could probably get much better results out of a conventional darkroom than I ever did. Whether it would be better than digital I have no idea.

But I would hazard a guess that for the vast majority of folks who have film negatives and want to either post them on the internet or make prints for framing, the digital darkroom produces very good results and is far easier and more convenient than the old chemical darkroom.

JBWX