I've used Vuescan, Silverfast Ai, and Espon Scan in my 4990. I've never noticed any difference in how "sharp" the resulting scans were, the three programs all seemed to produce scans that were equally sharp. The differences to me were more in how much control one has over the scanning process (most with Silverfast, a little less with Vuescan, much less with EpsonScan) and in how intuitive they were to use (not very, especially Vuescan). However, most of my scanning has been of b&w negatives, only a relative handful of color negatives and slides. While I wouldn't think that would affect questions of sharpness, it obviously eliminates your color issues.
I've never tried wet mounting. For 4x5 I use a holder made by UMax and for 8x10 I placed the negative on the glass.
FWIW I turn off all sharpening at the scanning stage. I also don't use a separate sharpening program. I've been doing this so long now that I think I can pretty well judge for myself where sharpening should be applied and in what radius/amounts in which different areas of the photograph (I almost never just apply the same scan settings to the entire photograph). I briefly tested PK Sharpen years ago but the requirement to convert my b&w images to RGB and the resulting increase in file sizes was a killer for my then-computer. I'll have to try it again one of these days now that I have a much beefier computer.
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Originally Posted by Brian Ellis
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