The older Nikon Coolscans seem to be quite good, but use Firewire. If you are saving hundreds of dollars, you can afford a Firewire card. The Coolscan 4000 came with the card as I recall. I downloaded a firmware upgrade for mine, and the newer software from the Nikon site, seems to be the same as the 5000 but not USB.
My friend bought the 9000 and says she likes it very much for 35mm and MF, I recall she said it went up to 6x9cm.
With the 4000, or 5000, you can get 64meg tifs from a frame, but I would not want to sit and watch it work, especially on a machine with less than a few GB of memory.
I was using the older version of the Epson 10000 XL for 11x14 scans at 600 dpi, and the computer ran out of memory and hung until some other software was closed, took the better part of an afternoon to scan a half dozen prints.
There are also work arounds to use the standard Nikon 4000/5000 film feeder as a roll feeder. The Slide batch feeder remains rather expensive, and seems to be going up in price.
If you are scanning some good prints, you should get decent results on almost any flatbed -- if you choose a good resolution and output type. Watch, if you do a 16 bit scan, you can adjust it and save it, but you need to convert to 8 bit if you want to save it as a jpeg, plus you need to adjust the file size down to post here.
Probably more than you were asking? I am no expert, but muddle my way through -- my local lab had a lot of trouble giving me truly good scans, a lot of places will scan your film around here, but the quality of the scans are not that great as they are time constrained.
I would recommend looking for a class in the local community college as a possible source, I hear good things about many of them, besides with your ID you should be able to snag some student prices on software you may want.
Regards, John
