When I was first exposed to drum scanning back in the mid 90's, one place where we had scans done in West L.A. had a Hell 3010 scanner. Yeah, on that, it was far more complicated. You never ever saw an image on the screen. The monitor was only to set all the scanning parameters but you had to use this little scope with crosshairs in it to pinpoint and set the ink percentages for white black and gray - and it was all in CMYK as that scanner could only deliver CMYK. So you'd scope the white point and set that to 5C, 3M and 3Y, set the mid tone to 50C, 40M, 40Y and set the black accordingly. You had to KNOW this shit upside down and inside out. It was more expensive to fix it after than to get it right in the scanner. I used to sit with the scanner operator at midnight over on Pico Blvd and tell them the numbers I wanted in my scans. There was no color management then. The scanner was calibrated directly to their proofing system and what you got was what you got from them.
Then as scanning for magazines and ads started to wane and fine art scanning started to take over, it was a much different experience. Color Managed graphic interfaces were introduced and a single click could get your scan pretty much 98 percent there, and a lot of the mystery of driving a drum scanner was gone. But while drum scanning software still has some complicated and esoteric features, all the packages out there today are really quite fast and easy and usually support IT8, Wolf Faust and Hutchcolor targets, making fast accurate scans simple. It's really pretty much the same in concept in drum scanner or flatbeds and they both do the basic stuff automatically - black point, white point and gray - if you want it to.
For color transparencies scanning it couldn't be easier than scanning a Hutchcolor target and saving the scanning setting used to scan the target and calling that up when you scan. For black and white I always scan flat to make sure no clipping at all happens. That makes for more work in Photoshop later but it's always worth it. Color negs are the one area where it really does take personal sensibility as there's no visual reference and having used at least half a dozen different scanning applications for color negs, it has always come down to one software package that has been just better at it than any other and that has been the long abandoned Trident 4.0 for Howtek. That's probably where the biggest learning curve is and what takes the most operator skill to get right.
To me, you sound like someone who has never actually operated a drum scanner or become familiar with the software and work like hell to convince yourself that your Epson is just as good. I started off with flatbeds then to fluid mounting on flatbeds then to drum scanning, but it was having the digital correction and toning skills from the very beginning that made the transition to drum scanning fairly easy. At least it seems easy in retrospect twenty-two years later.
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