Epson Perfection negative scans

I've been using an Epson Perfection V500 Photo scanner recently. It does a good job scanning the old film negatives. Here are the most important things I've learned:

• Disable the sharpening. While it makes the prints perhaps a little better, crops look definitely worse. Remember, you can always sharpen an image later, while preparing for printing, fixing red eye, cropping etc (post-processing).
• Digital ICE: definitely use this for color negatives. After carefully wiping dust off the negatives, the ICE will remove what specs of lint are left. It works very well. I use the "quality" setting and it appears to cause no softening or other problems. It's a win-win.
• Digital ICE: don't use for Black & White film. The Perfection has a "dust removal" setting that works pretty good. ICE caused huge image artifacts with B/W negatives.
• The "Epson Scan" software works well. Let it automatically set the exposure and color -- it nearly always does a better job than fiddling with the manual settings. For the occasional overexposed or underexposed photo, you can disable to "continous automatic exposure", highlight a portion of the image and have it auto-expose.
• Most of my 10-15 year old 35mm film I am scanning at 4800 dpi. There have been a very few that show a little more detail at 6400 dpi, but that results in a very large file. 4800 results in approximately one 100 MB file per image. Some of the blurry images, or low light images don't show any more detail above 1200 dpi.
• I generally use the "thumbnail" mode. Set the "thumbnail cropping area" to medium (under the Configuration button) -- it captures most of the frame, with usually none of the border area. Small will not get parts of the image near the edges of the frame. If the image has important detail at theedge, I sometimes will scan it without the thumbnail mode and set the capture frame manually. This also works for half-exposures that aren't detected manually.