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What should one keep an eye on when buying a lower medium grade scanner which can scan normal stuff, as well as 35mm film (the regular one) ?

I don't have any experience with scanning film, but have a lot of them which I'd like to have in digital form (I'm keeping the originals, though).

I tried looking at some reviews, but it's so hard to find good objective reviews these days, and if I ask the fellas at photography sites they go into holy wars over this sort of things (and out of my price range).

So, what does one need to watch out for when buying, and if you could suggest some model which you've heard is a good one, even better.

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kenrockwell.com/tech/scantek.htm has some good data. I, unfortunately, can't recommend anything because I worked for a few bit as a drum scanning tech -- nothing else does it for me anymore :) – emgee Oct 17 '09 at 18:48
Hahaha, very good :) I forgot to mention; I really'm not looking for anything specific - just a regular desktop type "flat" scanner (cover up, put the page, click scan type) - something up to maybe 350-400$. – ldigas Oct 17 '09 at 18:56
So a lot of models mentioned on that page really don't work out for me :( – ldigas Oct 17 '09 at 18:58
Definitely a good idea to keep the original negs, but digitising them does make them so much more available. And you rediscover some great stuff in the process of scanning. – pelms Oct 17 '09 at 20:19
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Most flatbed scanners are pretty awful at scanning negatives when compared to dedicated film scanners. A notable exception is the Epson Perfection V700 Photo (about $500) which has a seperate film scanning system built in to the lid and comes with film holder for 35mm, 120 and 5x4" negs and 35mm slides. The 35mm film holder allows you to scan 4 strips of 6 frames in one go. It can also make use of the Digital ICE system to automatically identify and remove dust and scratches from colour film by using an additional infra-red light source.

I bought one of these last year primarily to scan colour and B&W negs and have been very impressed with the results. It was more than I originally intended to spend, but I was persuaded to spend the extra after reading up on the subject. If you're willing to spend $350 to $400 it would definitely be worth thinking about paying the extra for a 'proper' film scanner such as this.

There's an in-depth review at photo-i.co.uk.

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