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Even for a dedicated analog photographer there are times when they wish for some of the advantages of digital work. There might be an image that has come out particularly well but has an unfortunate colour cast; perhaps a light source has been redder or bluer than anticipated and the effect has become exaggerated in the final image. If it's a picture of a stage pantomime this might be unnoticed - if it's a good portrait it might make the whole thing unpleasant.
What to do?
Well, come down off your high analog horse and put the negative or transparency into a scanner, and enter it into the digital world. Epson made the V 700, then the V800, and now probably a V900 flat-bed scanner specifically to deal with analog sources. The kit you get with any of these can run from 35mm to 4" x 5" negative or transparency, as well as dealing wih larger magazine and illustration material. Heck, I've even got my V700 to scan 8" x 10" negatives in the past and it does a superb job.
With the V series most of the criteria that you ask a scanner to take into account are adjustable - but you need to know what you are adjusting for and to. There are three levels of access to the scanner that increase in complexity, from programs that refer to themselves as "Auto", " Home" and " Professional ". The first is pretty simple, the last dauntingly complex, and the middle one the most user-friendly. It can be configured to scan material to cater to screen or printer resolution, and then increased past that for specialized needs.
These needs might be increased resolution from normal-sized materials or normal resolution from undersized originals. You pay a price in the grain you pick up and in the time that it takes for an individual scan when you ask more of the machine.
At the same time, it is not really the sort of device that you can sit at all day scanning your entire slide collection - boredom or madness sets in pretty soon and you abandon all resolutions. Epson also make a dedicated digitizer that can pass postcard prints into jpeg records very rapidly and this is a better choice for family archivists who bite off more than they can scan...
One thing as well, you will be surprised and horrified to see the amount of flaws that exist in what heretofore you thought were wonderful negatives or transparencies. I suspect gremlins get into the neg storage books with icepicks when we are all asleep. Be prepared to spot images every bit as much as you might have done in the pre-digital days.
