The XA / RPS 10M is a real gamble, if you get a working one then good luck keeping it working. The weak spot on this one is the automatic film advance, it loses its grip very quickly and you end up with bad spacing. Even if you apply some of the internet forum wisdom like scanning film upside down for added grip, the RPS 10M is just not a well designed piece of tech made for long haul use.
For scanning single frames its more faffing about than any scanner with a simple 6 frame strip holder.
Plusteks.. I don't mind the images it spits out, 48 bit positives converted in NLP with around 3200 effective DPI with plenty of detail imo for bigger prints. But its just too damn slow, I spend a full year having 'Plustek 8200 sundays' where I was scanning away my 35mm frames from the whole week. This is with a light pad & loupe 'pre-cull' to minimize my frames. And I'm not even a high volume shooter and don't do much in post. I was still homebound 6 hours (at a minimum) straight a week..
Camera scan rigs have so many variables that to get good results takes quite some tweaking and there is a lot of bad info out there. The two issues I see are bad macro lenses and bad LED light sources. Fix those two and you're going to see very good results.
I have a BEOON that takes seconds to setup, doesn't require calibrating with a mirror and such - and scans frames in seconds. Compares to a dedicated scanner its no contest. Its also basically future proof, if my Sony crop sensor dies or I want to upgrade any bits I always can.
Much better than buying a 20 year old piece of scanning tech that is almost guaranteed to need service and replacement parts in the coming few years, a problem I already have with electronic cameras. The price of 24MP sensor cameras is constantly coming down, the price of a LS-5000 or some such is just going up.
FWIW the very best 35mm scanner is the Minolta 5400 but good luck keeping that one running. Mk. I develops light source issues, Mk. II is also fickle. Bottom line is no one currently makes a well designed, quick solution that will keep working for the next 10 years.
