One nice workaround for digital noise that isn’t too onerous–assuming you’re holding the film steady enough–is to take a few exposures and simply average them together. A film scanner has an advantage you never get with live subjects: the things we’re taking pictures of sit perfectly still!
This post along with my next one in that same topic show a little data for the method.
The graph in the second post was taken back before my film transport could hold things under tension. I kind of want to repeat the experiment now; I suspect it’d be a much smoother curve. Even with that noisy data, it’s hard to argue against 3-5 averaged frames for squeezing another bit or two of depth out of the signal.
In my own results it completely eliminated that feeling of digital noise in the image. Now the only discernible noise is from the original grain in the film.