Since Day 1 I have said the Epson was a perfectly reasonable scanner for 4x5, but had its limitations. And as the format got smaller from there, its defects become a bit more apparent for obvious reasons. There's also more options out there for 35mm / 120. (Edited to add: the 4x enlargement mentioned by RD below is exactly where I have considered the limit of an excellent Epson scan to be.)
Many of us have used Epson scanners and have a lot of experience with them. I used to help teach students how to scan film and the photo lab was equipped with a half-dozen of them. They are also sometimes available to use at local libraries, free. Nice!
They still have their limitations and if one needs something a bit better, options exist, even if some are more troublesome than others due to aging hardware/software. I upgraded when I was in the middle of preparing a big gallery show and was making many large prints and had the budget to buy a better scanner. When printing 30 to 40 inches on the long side I found the results to be overall better than I had gotten before, in various metrics.
I'm not a test chart guy. I just don't care. I use the gear and I make photographs. Way back in 2013 though, I was bored and did a little comparison. At the time, I had a Microtek M1 scanner, which is pretty similar to an Epson but actually has autofocus and scans in a "tray" so no glass in-between the scanner lens and film. A pretty good scanner. I also had a shiny new Nikon D800E. I setup a shot and used the D800E to test this shot with studio strobes. Made a few exposures on various chromes, settled on the Provia 100F transparency. I scanned the film on that Microtek M1 and made some comparisons, which I'll leave aside for the moment.
Recently I was looking through some older film and came upon that transparency, and figured I would do a new scan on my Cezanne. I pulled up my old raw tiff files and Nikon raw image and sized it all up to comparable resolutions and then did some basic editing to match things up color-wise, at least as close as I felt like getting without serious work.
This is by NO means a scientific test. I also think chromes are the most challenging thing to scan well, and b&w would be a whole other kettle of fish.
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One other comment. Leaving completely aside the issue of performance, there's other reasons to prefer scanners. For one, I can scan 12 4x5 negatives at once on my scanner, or my 8x20 film on the platen. This is not insignificant from a workflow perspective. Even if someone came out with a new film scanner that blew out everything before now, I'd still probably stick with the Cezanne merely for this fact alone.
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