SilverFast vs VUEScan for use with Plustek OpticFilm 135i for Initial Scan

Hello all!
I’ve recently become interested in scanning negatives of all my families photo negatives. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on hardware options and have settled on a Plustek OpticFilm 135i. If we identify specific photos we want higher quality of than this hardware can produce we’ll spend the money on a professional lab scan.
The 8200i model comes with SilverScan SE Plus 9, but the 135i does not, and I’ve read the software it comes with is not the best.

Ultimately my initial plan is the scan through all the negatives and later go back with NLP to process the photos we really care about.

So I’m thinking about what software to use to perform the initial scan and save the raw DNG files for later processing. Here’s where I’m unsure if SilverFast, VUEScan, or the Plustek software will be the better option for this initial scan and RAW export for later processing?
I’ve also not quite been able to figure out if one version of SilverFast is the best for this step if not just getting SE Plus 9.

I’m also not quite clear if there is any processing I’d want to perform in one of these software before using NLP, and if so, is any of these options preferred for that?

I’m sure a lot of these can be answered if I knew what to search for, but since I’m a newb to this world I’m not quite sure what to search for. Any advice, topics to read further into, etc to help me get started with this is much appreciated. Thanks!

Welcome to the forum @TinCanFury

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