Hey MrCapri,
I do not have a lot of expertise with consumer grade digital cameras, so the feedback I can give is rather modest.
A lot of people have used these types of cameras to digitize film, with some very good results - even by taking just a single capture per frame. For certain cameras there exists interface software which makes controlling them from a PC presumably rather straightforward.
I have never tried this route of using standard digital cameras because I could not figure out how to interface my existing cameras to the small Super-8 frame format. And I didn’t want to buy an extra camera for my film project.
Usually, these kind of cameras are rather slow in photomode. So some people use these cameras in videomode, but I am uncertain whether you can change exposure settings fast enough in this mode to be usable. That is actually a common problem with all cameras - you have a noticable delay from the time you are requesting a certain exposure to the time the camera actually has settled to this exposure.
In fact, I switched at one point from taking images with different exposure times to working with a fixed exposure time in the camera and realizing the different exposures needed for my technique with a adjustable light source. This improved the time for scanning a film noticably.
Exposure fusion of several differently exposed images is a more involved technique than simply taking a single image per frame. As shown above, you can get very similar results both way. I would suggest an evolutionary approach, starting with the simplest setup (a constant, bright light source with daylight characteristics and a good camera) and do some scans with your material. Most of the film scanners nowadays operate like this and good results are obtained this way.
Only if you are not satisfied with these results, I would incremently advance the setup. The specific way to do that depends to a large extend on your taste and the willingness to invest personal time and other things.
One big disadvantage of taking several images of a frame is the increased scanning time. The longest Super-8 film I have has a running time of 1.5 hours - this will take my scanner about 90 hours to digitize, or nearly 4 days. Of course, the scanner can run unattended, but occasionally I prefer to check if the machine hasn’t chewed up my film.
In addition, the exposure fusion is an expensive algorithm in terms of processing times as well. For 1200 x 900 px (my usual choice) it takes about 1 sec per frame, for the maximal resolution I am working with, currently 2880 x 2160 pixel, my not-so-slow-PC needs about 3.5 seconds per frame - so for the above mentioned 1.5 hour long film, you have to add an additional 4 days to finally get the digitized frames. If you reduce the number of exposures you use per frame, the times quoted reduce noticably. Even only 2 different exposures will get you somewhere.
If you are working with raw image captures, you would not even need to use exposure fusion at all, especially if your camera features 12bit or, even better, 14bit DAC-resolution. This is all a question of taste and priorities - where do you want to spend time and effort, what is the final end product (for me, it’s web content which I can share easily) and what kind of software/workflow you have at your disposal.
While I have not tried to use a white light source, I think the shift in color temperature is not too pronounced, especially if the LEDs are ment to be dimmable anyway. Furthermore, exposure fusion has the tendency of covering up small differences between the different exposures of a single frame. So yes, that would be my approach to try out, especially because it is much easier to control. Even an Ardunio can handle that fine (in my scanner, an Arduino Nano is driving the steppers, reading the tension sensors and adjusting the LED intensities. The Arduino gets its commands from a Raspberry Pi, which is handling the image captures, streaming the images and additional data to a PC which finally stores the images and metadata on a hard disk. That setup has some historical reasons; the bottleneck is the transfer of the images from the Raspberry Pi to the PC via LAN.)
Concerning the IR image to mask dust and scratches - it will be interesting to see how far one can push this. Personally, I simply clean the film before I scan it. And many scratches you can “hide” by using a very diffuse illumination source, specifically an integrating sphere. One point overlooked here quite often is that this only works as intended if the film is as close as possible to the output port of the sphere. Otherwise, this effect is much reduced.