I think both issues, saturation and sharpness, are actually part of the scanning process. The projected slides are very pleasant. My scanner is a quite old Nikon LS-2000 film scanner, old enough to be on a SCSI interface. It's loads better than a transparency adapter on a flatbed scanner, but still, it's not very good resolution at 2700dpi (giving maybe an 8-megapixel frame) and it's a bit noisy, especially on bright images.

Regarding sharpness, keep in mind I was shooting through a 300mm f:5.6 lens on ISO 100 film, sometimes as slow as 1/125! I'm certainly not going to get past, or maybe even reach, 1/500, even in bright sunlight. Also, I'm not sure the F4 is always spot on with the auto-focus.

Once you say "I'm going to scan these slides" you open up the whole can of worms about gauging color, exposure, highlights, shadows, and so on, and trying your best to make it look like the slide itself, which will never happen.

Processing is by dropping off at the drugstore in the "send-it-off" box, from where it goes to a Fuji lab, and clearly marking the envelope as process E-6. I did have one roll get process as C-41 by some moron at the lab and got blue negatives instead of color positives, as detailed here.