It's nice to hear that someone else in the world has bought something that I have plumped for. Usually I buy the Edsel model of anything.
I got my son one of the 21" Sony flat screens. So many are being sold off now because people don't want a tube on their desk. It was about $180. It is utterly superb for his work of graphic design, and he of course has to get final prints to a very high colour accuracy.
The Nikon kit is out of my price range I'm afraid, and I gather that most models don't cover the old Kodak neg sizes...i.e. they are specifically for 35mm in slides or strip.
I notice too, that I can get down to a res that will show the chemicals on the film. So I seem to have all the ‘magnification' that I need. But I haven't thought this through fully.
I have an acquaintance in Austin who's father has literally thousands of transparencies. Many of them from Vietnam. Since the pictures from transparencies are so good, I wondered if one could take shots off the screen...I think I have compared this with my movie copying on an earlier thread. The speed at which one could copy would be phenomenal...if it would work. A friend in the UK used two sheets of optical glass. (I wondered if two junked scanner beds would work) With some paraffin wax or some such, pressed in between. He has been a photographer for 60 years, and he still thinks this is the best system. It might be that this would not be good enough for stills.
Right now, I'm copying a birthday book. The earliest entry was a birth-date of 1774, so I'm going for a detail that gives the fibers of the paper. 3m per (small) page. This is just in case I have the same disaster as my father. He lost everything in a house fire, and when I finally met his new family for the first time, I was able to show them pics of him from a period they had no record of.
However, I still haven't got an D-SLR!!!