All Epson scanners these days are supported at a basic level by the free sane drivers. They work great, but you're limited to a narrow choice of resolutions.
The avasys (formerly epkowa) driver will give you the whole range, but you have to use their iscan program to get full access--and it's a pretty lousy program, if I must say so (unless they've improved it in recent releases; I haven't updated it in some time). I have found that kooka does give me some extra resolution choices when I use the epkowa driver with it, however. Compiling it can be an adventure too.
The two drivers should be able to co-exist on your system. You just configure separate config files in /etc/sane.d for each one. Most front-ends will detect them both and give you a choice of which one to use. iscan only works with their proprietary one, of course.
I've only run a couple of film scan tests on mine (PM-A900==RX-700), so I can't say much about it. It worked well enough when using iscan, but the quality was rather low and fuzzy. Most of the blame may be due to my crappy negatives though.
Don't expect to be able to do a lot of quick batch-processing using iscan. You have to select, scan, adjust & save everything manually. When using kooka, funnily enough I can't access the avasys driver negative scanner through epkowa, but I can through the epson2 driver. On the other hand, it only scans the negative as a negative, it won't invert the colors.
If you really want to get the most out of your scanner though, you might consider purchasing the vuescan program, which gives you many more advanced features and functions. Follow the link in my signature below.