Also painting China bad is a great method of painting yourselves in better light domestically. Both sides of politics in the US have vested interest in this narrative.
The fact that this became a story at all is purely geopolitical in my opinion. Perhaps to do Blinkens up coming Beijing visit (which has since been canned). As far as I can tell the chinese dislike bad press like this. Having the balloon become a fiasco becomes a reason to cancel the trip. Can't exactly tell the why's but this is my guess.
Yes we primarily deal with 35mm color rolls, which I'd say accounts for 90% of our business. Though at our scale I wouldn't call the amount of Black and White or Slide we do as insignificant.
Generally I'd say the Noritsu Scanners yield the best results for time spent for 35mm/120. I'd say results wise they are 90% there compared to Flextights with the added benefit of having some ICE capabilities (the infrared readout for dust masking). The Noritsu 1800 is probably the best scanner on the market right now though it's price point certainly reflects it. We have about 4 in production.
That being said our favourite machine is the Fujifilm SP500 which is a dedicated 35mm Scanner, with superior ICE capabilities to that of the Noritsu though not as sharp but I'd say has about 80% as good as the noritsu though the Fuji do have a nicer colour science. We have about 16 of these guys.
The Flextight honestly doesn't get much use because it is far too slow of a workflow. We've had about 3/4 different models throughout the years all SCSI. I haven't used any of the new ones. Though honestly I don't think they are worth the time. The need to cut the negatives to use them alone is prohibitive and makes it more of a tool for special circumstances in our opinion.
I have yet to use many drum scanners or the fuji highend flat bed scanner but if someone has any to play around with one I'd like to give em a go.
You are actually on the money. We do this at my company. With much more challenging scanners than the Flextight. We've virtualised the Fujifilm SP3000 this was as well the the Noritsu S-1700 (which is a rarer precursor to the HS-1800 with very similar specs).
You can easily run most Flextight scanners on windows 10. I think you just need to install two version of Flexcolor. I have extensive experience in dealing with old scanners as this is actually my line of work. In our company we have almost over 20 scanners of certain types from various brands: Flextight, Noritsu, and primarily Fuji. We use a lot of KVM virtualisation using linux to passthrough PCI cards to VMs.