I have ~120 rolls of 35 mm negatives from 40-50 years ago I want to digitize at medium resolution (look good in a digital picture frame, not print enlargements). So I bought a Plustek OpticFilm 8100 scanner and installed the SilverFast 9 SE software that came with it… and I’m disappointed with the results. I get muddy inaccurate colors for Kodacolor II film using Kodak Gold, Kodak Max, or a custom Negafix file I found on the web, and that’s after futzing around for a few minutes on each of my first 100 negatives.
Claude AI hallucinated that I should just save raw DNG scans and buy Adobe LightRoom and Negative Lab Pro (somebody bribed the clanker? 
). It also suggested I try VueScan. I did, and although VueScan does have a Kodacolor profile, the color JPEG it produces looks slightly worse. So I guess I’ll spend more $$$ and time going the Lightroom + NLP route. Going forward, should I use SilverFast or VueScan to scan to create these .DNG files? I care more about time than money. I see in VueScan vs SilverFast quality? , @nate suggests SilverFast might be better.
Also, should I still specify a film type for the negative in SilverFast/VueScan if I’m scanning “48-bit HDR Raw”? I get different results choosing different film types when producing positive images in SilverFast/VueScan, but maybe it doesn’t matter so much if I’m going to do the work in NLP.
Thanks. I knew this wouldn’t be easy, and sadly I was right.