Problems you have with sharpening are interesting !!!!
Are you using "single slider" sharpening tools ? Remember that at least "two sliders" tools are required, radius and 100%, this is about balancing well radius and % and carefully avoiding the least overshot.
Please let me explain you again that I never oversharpen, with the V700 image I do the same that your Pro scanner does inside automaticly without you are aware.
Look, those crops are not mine, mostly corresponds to side by side made by others (nothing forged) showing Epson is inferior, then I present the same crop at x10 to x20, and amazingly the images do match perfectly, to the point that you may even not know if the image comes from the Epson or from Creo - Scanmate_Drum - Howtek_drum_Nikon500ED - Flextight.
Hey... take a look again, click on the thumbnails to see the 10x or 20x, NO difference, NO excessive sharpening:
Each of your 'examples' has errors of omission. Really serious ones. You refuse to show areas of smooth tone and critical grain detail - why? And then when challenged, give an 8x10 - which has the exact problems I outlined. If you'd aimed the scan for 1000-1200ppi or so, it might have looked pretty good. Furthermore, why does the Hasselblad scanner (in the non-downsampled examples I gave) quite clearly deliver reasonably accurate depictions of HP5's granularity all the way from 1500ppi up, yet the Epson doesn't?
And if you really knew anything about convolution problems, you wouldn't be using the most basic USM to try and resolve them - deconvolution sharpening and HIRALOAM in one form or another are often less obvious in their side-effects and more effective. The Epson still fails because of its fundamental shortcomings in resolution of granularity and small fine details in those lower contrast areas. But that would require you to accept and understand that MTF and noise have far more impact on overall resolution than any high contrast resolution target does.
