A general question on scanner best practice.

When scanning 5x7 B&W negatives (with Epson scan) on my Epson 4870 I find myself doing very little manipulation in the scanning process other than looking at the histogram for clipping at the two extremes and then processing the image in photoshop.

I recently took delivery of and scanned my first two 120 negatives with the Nikon 9000 scanner using the Nikon Scan software. The software allows for fairly extensive manipulation of the image to be scanned, setting the back/white points, saturation, hue etc. It was while reading the manual that I questioned whether I should be using more of the scanner's capability to manipulate the image and process less in photoshop.

So to my question, is it better practice (for the final print) to manipulate the image during the scanning process or to keep it simple and scan to get maximum detail from the negative and then process the image in photoshop?. For example, using unsharp mask, is it your practice to do any sharpening during scanning or to do it later in photoshop?

May I just add that the digital world continues to be a challenge and I'm glad I can retreat to my darkroom when things get too frustrating.