I very recently bought a Microtek i700 (Scanmaker 5) which has a variety of "EZ-Lockâ„¢" attachements for negs and slides etc "Film holders accommodate 35mm slides, 35mm filmstrips, 4"x5 film, and medium format film up to 6x9cm and 6x17cm panoramic".
I'm new to neg scanning so cannot really compare with anything else but I decided to buy this because ... actually I've created a page about
my novice scanning experience so you can read about why I bought this there and a bit more detail about the software etc.
In a nutshell I'm really happy with it, but I am now also going to buy either GEM (basic) or VueScan software to remove grain (and more so noise).
I have found this necessary for reprocessing negs with low contrast (not my fault) and overexposed shots (my fault). In both cases the noise / grain can be extreme.
I'm now thinking of shooting exclusively on transparency film as these seem to come up much better (and, like you, I am moving towards professional processing and doing the rest myself). I will have them left in strips of 6 or just in the roll (and then cut into six) as this is the size of (a) insert pages and (b) the scanning holder.
The grain / noise was the biggest surprise and disappointment but my early results with GEM have been VERY satisfying (nothing posted yet on my site as I am still using the trial version with watermarks). ICE is great to have (i700 comes with it) but GEM is very impressive.
I will trial Vuescan - I like the idea that Vuescan gives you a raw scan to play with (unlike all other software as far as I can tell) and (in the more expensive version) you can save these raw files (scanning negs is VERY slow as you need 2500 dpi+). The grain / noise reduction is important to me - as much of my work is in low light so it will have to cut the mustard there - I cannot afford to buy both so Vuescan will have to do this as well as GEM if I'm going to buy it.
Hope this helps - please share your experience.