Before I went digital I got a HP S20 negative scanner. (Actually negative/slide/small print scanner.) It cost about $550 at the time but did a somewhat good job on 35 mm trannies.
I then spent a bit over a year making ~4 meg Jpeg scans of my ~12,000 slides.
Buying my first digital camera was a no brainer.
If you want to make some quite large prints from MF film then there do seem to be some good flat bed scanners that do a pretty good job. You might want to do a search on
www.luminous-landscape.com. The issue has been discussed there a few times.