What's the budget? what resolution do you need? Can you say a bit more about what you are trying to do?
Are you referring to optical character recognition (OCR)? (document reading) that can be stand alone software, basically you scan, produce an image then do OCR, All scanners will create JPG's. For scanning negatives/positives, you need a scanner which has a light source in the cover to backlight the film.
I use the Epson V700, which does:- 35mm strip film: 4 x 6 frames, 35mm mounted film: 12 frames, 120/220 Medium format (Max. 6 x 20cm): 2 frames, 5 x 4 inch: 2 frames, 203 x 254mm when using film area guide.
It is a superb machine. but quite expensive. I scanned everything I had from the last 50+years Photography, archival quality TIFF, also all the family pictures I could lay my hands on.
When Scanning negative strips, it treats each negative as a separate image automatically, I took months to scan all my old negatives, but all I had to do was swap over the negatives, 24 at a time, so became a background task. The software automatically numbers each image, so makes everything easy. When doing bulk scanning, I didn't apply corrections with the scanner, It just slows the process too much, also just uses a sensible resolution and colour depth.
You can get little standalone film/slide scanners and really inexpensive flatbed scanners, just depends on what you need to do.
