I remain curious about the focus on Epson scanners. The Canon 9950f was the editor's pick at PC Mag. I bought one after a good experience with the Canon 4000, a devoted film scanner. With the current version of Vuescan, which has been specifically tweaked for the 9950, I am getting terrific scans, at least as good as those of the Microtech 1800. Kirk had a bad experience, and was exactly right that the scans were not very good with the software he had available. Vuescan got much better this summer, and with the Dec 8th release, with specific tweaks for the 9950, it was so much better that I have been spending a lot of hours rescanning and reprocessing all of images I had scanned with older versions. I do not use Silverfast because it cannot do the 4800>2400 conversion that is at the heart of my workflow, so I cannot comment on the results with it.

Quality control is an issue. For a nominal fee, Canon sells a 3 year extended warranty. Not a bad deal.