Death all the way.
I'm not a huge Black Metal fan but I really dig Bathory (their first album totally fuckin' kills) and Darkthrone. I hated BM for a long time but those guys showed me its not all dicks dressed in their mum's clothes trying to be scary.
A lot of the modern bands I've heard really suck and have got the lame Dimmu Borgir/Cradle of Filth/Manson thing going on.
I'm slowly discovering bands because I love a bunch of D-Beat punk and the black metal shares some similarites musically.
Wikipedia will explain the differences better than me:
Black Metal
Death Metal
^^ Fuckin' love these two albums at the moment!