Thanks, I can’t tell whether you already have experience with the X5. I have an elderly Imacon Flextight Precision II so I don’t have experience myself but they work in the same fashion. The X5 is much, much faster and I think has extra dynamic range. I think that they both share the same 75mm Rodenstock Magnagon lens (fixed aperture but thought to be very similar to the Apo-Rodagon 2x). They can both scan to the ‘FFF’ proprietary RAW format so this means that you can take these home with you and process at home, the Flexcolor software is free to download, I’d recommend that you do that since you don’t want to have to learn how to use Flexcolor as part of your paid time.
Using 3F means that the only reason to rescan is perhaps if they weren’t as clean as you like but also if the focus wasn’t spot on and you can check this with something called the Detail Window and changing the Descreen setting by a unit either side.
Nate has advice on dealing with 3F scans in NLP here:
Note that he doesn’t work with the 3F scans, he renames the ‘fff’ suffix to ‘tif’, but whatever you do 3F gives you the best of both worlds.