A while ago I got Michelle an Epson V600 scanner for Christmas. She had a bunch of old photos she wanted to archive. I've also got a bunch too, some of which have negatives. The scanner has 6000+ DPI resolution, infrared channel to remove dust & scratches, and does transparencies (film negatives) with a grid to hold 35mm and large format film. It also works well in both Windows and Linux; Epson has better Linux support than other manufacturers. It works well on just about everything from documents to photos, but the software (both Epson's provided and the open source Linux stuff) is tweaky to use and we'd never scanned film negatives.

The first time I scanned negatives I was disappointed. They looked terrible! I read up on this and found it's mainly due to the complete lack of color profiles for different brands of film. I also read about ViewScan, the swiss army knife of scanning software that's been around for a long time.

Long story short: with VueScan, scanning the negatives produces higher quality images than prints from the same negatives And it is far more configurable so you have great control over what the images look like. It enhanced the value of our scanner, making it more useful and versatile.

VueScan is an interesting piece of software. Every version has 3 versions to run natively on Win, Mac and Linux. Yes, native Linux! It is a free download that is fully functional, except images it produces have a watermark. When you buy it, you get a license code that eliminates the watermarks in the output. Once unlocked you can run copies on several computers and any number of scanners you want. It supports thousands of scanners and (on my Linux system) didn't need special drivers. There are 2 versions to buy: standard and professional. The latter has a few extra features and lifetime free upgrades.

ViewScan is not necessarily easy to use. It has a UI that only an engineer could love. Once you learn it, it is fast and efficient to use. But it's quirky and the documentation is like Unix: thorough and useful, if you already understand how the software works and want to know how to do a specific thing. But it doesn't explain anything at a high level, so it's completely un-helpful if you're trying to figure out how it works.

Case in point: multi-crop for film negatives and other things you scan with multiple items per sheet. Details coming soon...
Well it's been a few years, but I finally wrote down those multi-crop details.