Is Slide Really Better?

There's something undefinably nice about the way a correctly exposed slide frame looks. I often get a special thrill out of them -- even scanned on my low-end Minolta Dimage Scan Dual II scanner. This is one reason I went through a rather a lot of trouble to investigate what, exactly, it is. Unfortunately, I came up with... nothing. Here's the story -- probably the most work I've put into an article yet, and probably the least useful article on my website.

The contenders: slide and neg seen by digital.

I know I'm putting myself up on a limb here, and opening myself to all kinds of criticism about sloppy methodology, unskilled or unfair post-processing, biases, cheap equipment, and what have you. Therefore, a few disclaimers -- and I mean them.

1. This experiment has any validity only when discussing roughly similar equipment to mine -- entry-level or at most midrange consumer scanners, midrange DSLR's, commercial processing.
2. The experiment is especially unfair towards slide: I know for a fact that a better scanner could recover significantly more detail and at least a little more tonal range than mine.
3. Nothing is "raw." I've had to post-process everything in order to get roughly comparable looks. I haven't been at all strict about my post-processing: instead, I've done it to the best of my ability for each of these media. I have not consciously tried to make any one of them look bad or another good. However, I've also not gone to any great lengths to make them look identical, except where there's a specific characteristic I'm looking at.