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Rank Cintel 35mm Telecine


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I think Rank Cintel was a very popular telecine company in the standard definition days before Spirit and it's SDC series of film scanners took over. And blackmagic bought them and developed the blackmagic cintel scanner.

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The Rank Cintel is an earlier generation of the DFT/Thompson Spirit. It has nothing to do with the BMD Cintel. 

You can use these and convert them to work with a modern imager and electronics. Many people do this and it works really great actually. Robert @ Cinelab has a Xena and it's based on a similar chassis to this. 

These machines use a green CRT as the lamp source and they're impossible to get, so they don't work "as is" anymore sadly, unless they have a bunch of spare CRT's lying around. 

This was the first telecine I ever operated and it was a good machine, workhorse actually, especially with the 1080p camera combined with a DaVinci and HDCAM VTR to capture with. 

Remember, modern machines are way better and don't rely on such old technology. 

 

Edited by Tyler Purcell
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Rank-Cintel had absolutely nothing to do with the Thompson DFT Spirit, in fact Cintel and Thompson were competetors in the Telecine marketplace.

Cintel (then Rank bought them so it became Rank-Cintel) introduced the first really high quality Telecine in the 1970's and that is what this chassis is here, a MK3 Cintel Telecine.

Cintel used a system called "Flying Spot" that used a CRT to make the light for the scan, the Thompson Telecine used three linear CCDs and a hot lamp for the light source.

Cintel had several 4K scanners based on the Flying Spot tech at the end of their run, then BlackMagic Design bought Cintel.

The mechanical film deck and chassis on Cintel Telecine systems is second to none and is essentially a great platform for refitting as a modern scanner.

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