Having your images fluid mount scanned has a huge impact, especially on B&W images where Digital ICE dust and scratch removal doesn't work.  

The film is being placed on a fluid mount film holder in a Kami fluid with a Mylar sheet sealing on top.  It is therefore completely submerged in the wet mounting fluid.  All air bubbles are removed before the image gets scanned.  

Since the image is laying in the fluid, impurities like scratches and dust are drastically reduced which results in a clean scan. 

The bases on many films have coatings that include small particles and microspheres to reduce static and keep layers of film from sticking to each other in the roll. The image grain (and dye clouds in color films) create little bulges in the emulsion's surface. You can see that faint relief if you hold a developed sheet of film so that light bounces off of the emulsion towards you.

In normal enlarging, the irregularities don't matter.  When the illumination is highly collimated, as it is in point-source enlarger heads and film scanners, all those little bumps on the surface of the film refract light out of the optical path and become highly visible. That is why fine scratches, dust, and grain are enhanced so much. Fluid mount scanning gets rid of all of that. 

On color images the benefit of fluid mount scanning lays in the reduced amount of visible grain and noise as well.  Tonal gradation and separation in highlights and shadows is improved.  Newton's rings get eliminated.

Price list for fluid mount scanning (in addition to standard scanning):

Below are samples that show some of the benefits of fluid mount scanning on B&W images (click on the image to open another window which lets you zoom in and move around in the enlarged image). Note that the images have not been sharpened on purpose:

35mm Scan
Dry Scanned	Fluid Mount Scanned
Medium Format Scan
Dry Scanned	Fluid Mount Scanned