Hi HSWB,
The Epson 800/850 is available for pre-order but not on the market yet, at least in North America, as far as I can tell (mainly looking at the B&H website). If you don't have an appropriate macro lens, and depending on what you would get, the cost can easily exceed the cost of the scanner, and you may need some set-up gear, so if you;re financially greenfield on both options, I wouldn't expect a major economic advantage of the one route over the other. Use of time is another matter, and here's where it gets a bit tricky. The Epson 850 will have holders that can mount 3*6 photo strips of film, so 18 photos per frame. In SilverFast, with its batch scanning and job manager capabilities, the productivity of digitizing batches of photos at a time is pretty good. With the camera scanning, it's true that it's only a click, not a scan pass, but you do need to line up each frame under the lens properly before making that click - so faster probably, but how much faster - remains to be tested. I haven't conducted this horse-race - yet; but may, as there is some interest in productivity. I may be having much more to say about all this "in the fulness of time", and comparing options is on the agenda. Stay tuned. One thing I can definitely advise you as of now: as long as you have the negatives, DO NOT waste your time scanning the prints. The prints are already heavily degraded relative to what you'll get from film scans even before you start any post scan editing.