I took a photography class in middle school. We used 35 mm black and white film. I scanned all the negatives in with a decent Nikon film scanner. I can't remember why I settled on scanning at 2MP, but you could already see the grain: https://i.imgur.com/dcFksGp.jpeg
If you still have them, and a digital camera with a macro lens, you'll be surprised how much better result (actual resolved resolution versus MP "resolution") you'll get with than using a scanner.
If I had to guess as why you stopped at 2MP, it was probably a mixture of diminishing returns in terms of extra resolving power and size. Idk when you took them, but I imagine size was also a consideration. A 2MP uncompressed tiff (which I imagine is what the scanner gave you) is ~5MB. Now, you could drop that down to ~1.6 if you could save them as single channel rather than RGB.
This is also where the optimal conditions come in (motion blur, camera shake, exposure, and how it was developed).
It was! I scanned them around 2009, so it wasn't size, it was that I wasn't getting more useful resolution. The scanner was a Nikon Coolscan V ED. I might still have some prints I can look at to compare, but I'm not sure how to do the same with a negative.
