You might do better asking in rec.photo.digital.

I would suggest you hunt down a used Minolta Scan Multi.  Resolution
wasn't very high (2800 IIR), but a real trooper of a scanner.

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DSMU/DSMUA.HTM

Or a used Nikon 8000.  Although these are not sold very often used.

I have a new (last year) Nikon 9000 and it is very good.

The usual suspects are the Epson flatbed and Nikon film-only scanners. My
experience has been that the Epson 4800 ppi scanners are nowhere close to
the Nikon 4000 ppi scanners. Nikon makes an affordable 35mm-only scanner
(Coolscan V), a pricey 35mm-only scanner (5000), and a painfully expensive
35mm and 120 scanner (9000). All are excellent.

My recommendation would be to spend up to US$200 on an Epson 4800 ppi
scanner, either new or refurbished from Epson, and use it to learn scanning
with minimal expectations for the quality. You should be able to get killer
8x10s from 645 and 6x6, and very nice 12x16s (maybe even 13x19s) from 6x7.

The Epson V700 or V750 might be a tad better than their 4800 ppi scanners,
but the last I checked, they were quite a bit more expensive.

Then take a couple of your sharpest, clearest, best composed 35mm and 120
frames (as seen under at least a 20x loupe) and get professional scans made.
The Nikon film scanners will do very nearly as well as that, and seeing
those, you can decide if it's worth it to spend the money on a Nikon
scanner.

Soldarity wrote,on my timestamp of 7/08/2008 5:06 AM:

at "very reasonable price" your only option is
a used flatbed.  Try an Epson 4990: some folks
are ditching them to jump to the V700. They are
almost as good as, for 35/120.
The Rolls-Royce is the Coolscan 8000/9000 but
those are w-a-a-a-a-y too expensive if you're on
a budget.
You might try a 2nd-hand Microtek Artixscan 120tf,
they used to have quite a following because of
their "soft" light source.  Who knows, you might
find one at a good price.  Be aware that replacing
the light tube on those is a RPITA...

I'm getting by pretty well with a Canon 9950F.  I got one of the first
ones released, based upon specs (an error on my part) and found that
it falls short of those expectations.  Practically though, I'm quite
pleased with it, the basic design and function is decent and if I do
my part, it gives satisfactory results with 120 and LF films.  I
assume that a used one in good condition would be quite affordable.

Craig Schroeder
craig nospam craigschroeder com

I've been using an Epson 4900 PHOTO scanner with good results. The
scanner's ability to resolve medium format and larger is overkill IMHO.

For 35mm, I have found by trial & error that a 2400 dpi scan of
Kodachrome 25 slides will generally begin to reveal film grain just
before image pixels are visible, yielding approximately a 1.2 to 1.8 mb
file size per slide.

The scanner came with plastic frames to hold 4x 35mm strips, 8x 35mm
slides, 3x 2.25 filmstrips (two exposures each if you shoot square
format), and 2x 4x5 negatives/positives.

I'm pretty happy with this scanner. Last time I scanned, I was doing
2.25 format with a 400mHz P3 PC running WinXP. I've also done 8x 35mm
slides with this setup. Both scans were *very* slow with this setup, as
in 20 - 30 minutes/frame until finished. However, the finished scan was
worth the time. In any case, one can get everything set up, start the
scanning, and go do something else for a while.

I suppose that my only software complaint here is that there is no easy
way for the 4900 PHOTO user to know in advance, given a computer's
overall processing power, at what chosen scanning resolution vs. CPU
speed and available memory will the Epson scanning program be paging
scanned data to disk (very slow) rather than performing all scanning
operations entirely in memory (much faster).

Next time, I'll be using a 1.6gHz P4 PC, XP, and things *should* be
considerably faster. Ironically, I also have a Sun Ultra-45 which has a
1.6gHz 64-bit processor w/4gb RAM, but no software interface for the
Epson :-( Something along these lines, Epson-compatible, would be a
definite plus. There are certainly plenty of new PCs available which
could take advantage of this scanner's outstanding abilities and deliver
excellent scanned files much faster than what I have outlined here.

The 4900 PHOTO also comes with proprietary "dust & scratch" software. My
experience with this is that it needs lots of RAM, so the more you have,
the quicker the process from start to finish.

-- Max.

I'm using a CanoScan 8800F for scanning 120 & 35mm. I've only posted a
few sample results in B&W but will have a lot more coming. These
( http://www.flickr.com/photos/proteusguy/tags/canon8800f/ - login
with a free account to get access to bigger size) pics have not been
retouched except to clear dust marks as I'm also testing some new film/
developer combinations. I generally scan @ 3200dpi optical resolution.
Looks like you can find them new for under USD $200 in the states. Has
good colour balance without needing to use any correction options (i
prefer to scan as raw as possible and correct in gimp/digikam/
photoshop as needed) which makes my effort a bit easier. Only issue is
that the 120 holder fits 4 645 negatives in a single row whereas I
preferred cutting my negs into rows of 5. So I'm switching to new neg
holders but I got several hundred negative sets cut in 3 groups of 5
that will take me longer to scan.

   best of luck,

   -- Ben Scherrey
      http://biggestfan.net