Damn straight. I have been dabbling in large-format for a few years now, using a mid-fifties Graplex Crown Graphic 4x5 press camera. I develop the film in a Jobo ATL1000 automated film processor, which is a brilliant device that takes out most of the really hard bit, and drives the costs down a hell of a lot.

However, scanning the resulting slides/negatives (if you're used to 35mm a 4x5 neg is REALLY impressive ) is a very slow process. Using my V700 at maximum 6400 DPI 16 bit resolution takes over 20 minutes per image, and setting up the negative can easily take as long. Invariably there is some dust you didn't notice on the first pass, and you have to do it again. And again. And again.

I've spent upwards of an entire afternoon just getting one good scan. That's before you fiddle around with it digitally. And the size of the file is ridiculous. 4 x 5 inches at 6400 DPI gives a 25600 x 32000 image (819.2 MP!). In 16 bit B&W that's nearly one and a half GB per image. A colour image is three times the size.
Of course, scanning most film at that resolution is pointless as it's far beyond the resolution of the original lens, and in many cases beyond the resolution of the film grain. At a more sensible 3200DPI you end up with 390MB images, which are still pretty large for most photo editing software.

Luckily I don't take a lot of LF pictures

Medium format image are still pretty damn big. Even 6x4.5cm, the smallest 120 film size, ends up as raw files around 40MB in size @ 3200DPI, or 120MB in colour which is what I mainly use for MF. They eat up disk space really fast. 35mm images are much more reasonable, but a couple of thousand of them still needs a large drive.

That said, at least in MF and especially in LF, the image quality is so far beyond any currently reasonable digital camera that it's truly amazing. I have played with £75k digital cameras that give MF a real run for it's money, but I can't really justify an imaging system that costs nearly as much as my house

The film is surprisingly inexpensive and still easily available, and the cost of the cameras secondhand if anything is going up. All the studios dumped it in favour of digital, and put all this lovely gear in the hands of amateurs who could never have afforded it before. As a result larger formats of film have had a real resurgence over the last few years.

That said, scanning 1500 slides would be a job I certainly wouldn't want. It would take a long, LONG time.

pca