[GlenBarrington]

at the advanced amateur market have gone away. All that's left are the simpler ones that produce scanned images of 5 megapixels or less, and pro quality devices of great cost and don't produce much more than 5 megapixels themselves but have great features for bulk scanning and fine control over output.

That being said, 5 megapixels is plenty if you don't intend to enlarge a photo to the size of a barn. You will still be able to see film grain in the scanned images if you enlarge the image to a big enough size (depending on original negative size, of course). So the original 'grainyness' of a photo will also limit your ability to enlarge the scanned photo.

For snapshots, most any scanner will work, they will produce an image that will allow you to do all the things you could do otherwise with snapshot photos. For more 'serious' photography, I wouldn't buy a flatbed scanner that can do film if it produced an image of less than 3 megapixels.

If you won't be scanning on a regular basis, but have a specific, but modest amount of negatives to scan (say Less than 1000-2000 negatives), you might get better results by having a photolab do them for you. It's kind of a skill to do excellent scanning, and if you are a perfectionist, you might be happier faster by having a pro do it. It might be cheaper than buying a higher quality scanner too.

Hope this backgrond info helps.