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Did Lasergraphics cherry pick their Arriscan comparison or is this representative of the two scanners?


Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

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The Arriscan is not, and never was designed to scan print film. Print and negative are different beasts and that's a scan of print film.  The Director (which is what that particular example was done on (they've used that same image since before the ScanStation existed), was designed to handle both print and negative from the beginning. The ScanStation's results are similar so it's fair to use that image on the ScanStation page, by the way. 

Cherry picked? In a sense, I guess. But they're picking film that shows off a legitimate difference between the two machines. What company doesn't do that in their marketing?

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What benefits does the Arriscan have over the Lasergraphics Scan Station? I had heard the Arriscan cost 3 or 4 times what the Scan Station cost.

These scanners have been compared (here, on this forum) so many times. Search is your friend. 

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Do you want to compare an AMG-GT (Arriscan) to a Ford -GT (LG Director) by a decade old image on one of the companies web sites?

Good luck buying your $500K + scanner system.

These are True RGB scanners and in another class of machine than the Scan Station.

I have scanned positives on my Arriscan it can do a good job, not my first choice to do that. I bet the Arriscan XT with it's new ALEV - Alexa sensor would do great.

Remember to always believe all companies marketing claims on their web sites at all times for a healthy life.

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Yes they did and that comparison is over a decade old and useless now. Don't ask me why LG still uses it because it makes their own product look worse than it currently is: you're not going to see noise like that without HDR scanning any more on either of them, plus they've both moved from CCD to CMOS so we're talking about a fundamentally different type of sensor noise. Also I'm pretty sure that the ScanStation doesn't do true HDR scanning, what the Director does is two or three exposures at different intensities to bring out the details in the dense regions: a little bit more in the highlights for negs and a bit more in the shadows for print. The ScanStation does two flashes very quickly at the same intensity, it's just designed to reduce noise really it can't bring out extra detail the way that the Director's 2-flash or 3-flash scanning can.

Perry's in error. The early Arris were not designed for print that's correct, the later ones are. They have a setting for print and do a great job. They had 2-flash HDR from the very start I believe, or if not from the start early on. That's what you're seeing in those pictures: film that's too dense for the scanners that they were scanned on largely due to the imagers of the time. Those old CCD imagers needed to do a high pass and a low pass to compensate. You won't see noisy scans like that off normal prints now.

Again the website is useless if you're wanting to know about Arri vs Director. LG is highlighting completely the wrong thing there. Director has options for all formats: 35mm,16mm, 8mm, and also 28/17.5/9.5 I'm pretty sure. It also has soundtrack readers that the Arri doesn't have (though it can't do 35mm mag). The Arri has a wetgate which the director doesn't, although that's only relevant in a wetlab setting. At the time of that comparison (2010?) the Director was 2K and 35/16 only, was a sprocket-driven scanner, completely different imaging tech, completely different light, etc. Director I think is easier to operate than Arriscan: Arri runs on linux, LG on Windows 10. Arri has interchangable transports: it has a sprocket transport and a sprocketless one, but the Director only has one transport now which is sprocketless (the old ones had sprocket transports). Pretty sure even now the Director has way more overscan wasting resolution compared with Arri. So unless you have a time machine and wish to travel back in time to 2010, all the meaningful differences are very different now to what they were then.

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Very interesting Robert. Nice form-factor, but it's still on feet whereas Arriscan comes on casters as you know and you can wheel it around. I know that sounds like a small thing, but I do know that one my mates has to take his Arri to the client on occasions where they have sensitive film they don't want to let out, so transportability can be important. Nice design though and it seems to be full-featured which would include their DFT soundtrack reader which Arri doesn't have.

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On 10/26/2022 at 10:14 AM, Perry Paolantonio said:

The Arriscan is not, and never was designed to scan print film. Print and negative are different beasts and that's a scan of print film.  The Director (which is what that particular example was done on (they've used that same image since before the ScanStation existed), was designed to handle both print and negative from the beginning. The ScanStation's results are similar so it's fair to use that image on the ScanStation page, by the way. 

Cherry picked? In a sense, I guess. But they're picking film that shows off a legitimate difference between the two machines. What company doesn't do that in their marketing?

These scanners have been compared (here, on this forum) so many times. Search is your friend. 

 

OK, thanks Perry. I can take the Arriscan off my list of scanners to buy if the $1.2 billion lotto comes in tonight.  99.999% of my film Archive is positive film. 

Does the Arriscan do better than the Scan Station when it comes to negs Perry?

(Maybe that question has already been answered, as I'm just getting time to revisit this thread. If so, then you don't have to repeat the discussion.)

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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On 10/26/2022 at 2:01 PM, Robert Houllahan said:

Do you want to compare an AMG-GT (Arriscan) to a Ford -GT (LG Director) by a decade old image on one of the companies web sites?

Good luck buying your $500K + scanner system.

These are True RGB scanners and in another class of machine than the Scan Station.

I have scanned positives on my Arriscan it can do a good job, not my first choice to do that. I bet the Arriscan XT with it's new ALEV - Alexa sensor would do great.

Remember to always believe all companies marketing claims on their web sites at all times for a healthy life.

 

That is why I am asking the forum Robert.

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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On 10/26/2022 at 6:18 PM, Dan Baxter said:

Yes they did and that comparison is over a decade old and useless now. Don't ask me why LG still uses it because it makes their own product look worse than it currently is: you're not going to see noise like that without HDR scanning any more on either of them, plus they've both moved from CCD to CMOS so we're talking about a fundamentally different type of sensor noise. Also I'm pretty sure that the ScanStation doesn't do true HDR scanning, what the Director does is two or three exposures at different intensities to bring out the details in the dense regions: a little bit more in the highlights for negs and a bit more in the shadows for print. The ScanStation does two flashes very quickly at the same intensity, it's just designed to reduce noise really it can't bring out extra detail the way that the Director's 2-flash or 3-flash scanning can.

Perry's in error. The early Arris were not designed for print that's correct, the later ones are. They have a setting for print and do a great job. They had 2-flash HDR from the very start I believe, or if not from the start early on. That's what you're seeing in those pictures: film that's too dense for the scanners that they were scanned on largely due to the imagers of the time. Those old CCD imagers needed to do a high pass and a low pass to compensate. You won't see noisy scans like that off normal prints now.

Again the website is useless if you're wanting to know about Arri vs Director. LG is highlighting completely the wrong thing there. Director has options for all formats: 35mm,16mm, 8mm, and also 28/17.5/9.5 I'm pretty sure. It also has soundtrack readers that the Arri doesn't have (though it can't do 35mm mag). The Arri has a wetgate which the director doesn't, although that's only relevant in a wetlab setting. At the time of that comparison (2010?) the Director was 2K and 35/16 only, was a sprocket-driven scanner, completely different imaging tech, completely different light, etc. Director I think is easier to operate than Arriscan: Arri runs on linux, LG on Windows 10. Arri has interchangable transports: it has a sprocket transport and a sprocketless one, but the Director only has one transport now which is sprocketless (the old ones had sprocket transports). Pretty sure even now the Director has way more overscan wasting resolution compared with Arri. So unless you have a time machine and wish to travel back in time to 2010, all the meaningful differences are very different now to what they were then.

 

Thanks for the rundown Dan. 

What is the difference in the soundtrack readers between the Arri and LG?

For good HDR you need a normal exposure and an over and under exposure. These can range from.5 stop to 1.5 stop generally speaking. In the early days of HDR they had something called pseudo HDR, it was done with software only. You imported the image and it spit out the result. If you could not get multiple exposures in-camera, then you did it in post with something called single image HDR. It was not as good as in-camera HDR, but it was better than the pseudo HDR that the software did. 

Here is an example of highest quality single image HDR combined with contrast grading. It was done in post only, not in- camera, not in-scanning, just in Lightroom for exposures and contrast grading and HDR software to combine the 3 files done in Lightroom.

 

sunlit-slipper-silver-print-vs-inkjet-pr

 

You can't get that level of recovery with cine' film scanning as you can't do the contrast grading unless you are working with the TIFF files. Even then it is hard to match that level of post work frame to frame. This example had 2.5 hours of Lightroom in it.

 

sunlit-slipper-copyright-1973-daniel-d-t

The Sunlit Slipper – Los Angeles 1973

Photo: D.D.Teoli Jr.

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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On 10/29/2022 at 9:02 PM, Dan Baxter said:

Very interesting Robert. Nice form-factor, but it's still on feet whereas Arriscan comes on casters as you know and you can wheel it around. I know that sounds like a small thing, but I do know that one my mates has to take his Arri to the client on occasions where they have sensitive film they don't want to let out, so transportability can be important. Nice design though and it seems to be full-featured which would include their DFT soundtrack reader which Arri doesn't have.

That is something! What service. On-site scanning. How much extra $$ is that? They should charge them a fortune unless there is competition that will do it. I'd tell them to bring the film to me and not take the scanner to them. 

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On 10/26/2022 at 11:34 PM, Robert Houllahan said:

Beautiful machine, funny how DFT is waking up to this design. Similar idea to the Scan Station actually. Kinda nothing like the older DFT products. Did you by any chance get a price on this? 

Edited by Tyler Purcell
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9 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Beautiful machine, funny how DFT is waking up to this design. Similar idea to the Scan Station actually. Kinda nothing like the older DFT products. Did you by any chance get a price on this? 

It is allot more like the Director or Arriscan XT than the Scan Station as it is true RGB and multi flash per color HDR plus IR.

The DFT Oxscan 14K for 67/70 is also a area scan monochrome sensor.

Line scan scanners are probably allot harder to engineer and the line sensors available are far more limited.

I would guess $6-750K for the new DFT machine before options.

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2 hours ago, Robert Houllahan said:

It is allot more like the Director or Arriscan XT than the Scan Station as it is true RGB and multi flash per color HDR plus IR.

The DFT Oxscan 14K for 67/70 is also a area scan monochrome sensor.

Line scan scanners are probably allot harder to engineer and the line sensors available are far more limited.

I would guess $6-750K for the new DFT machine before options.

Oh true. 

Yea it's gotta be more then the scanity

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23 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

You can't get that level of recovery with cine' film scanning as you can't do the contrast grading unless you are working with the TIFF files. Even then it is hard to match that level of post work frame to frame. This example had 2.5 hours of Lightroom in it.

You need to try using some color grading software and stop making direct comparisons to still image scanning and editing. What you're doing here is easy in any grading application if the image data is there. You don't do motion picture grading frame-to-frame. You do it shot by shot, and sometimes you have to break a shot up or use keyframes to make in-shot adjustments.

But you can't make comparisons between lightroom and motion picture grading software as if it's exactly the same process. It's not. There is certainly some overlap, but software like Resolve, Baselight, Nucoda, etc, are all designed to deal with film-originated content and could pull out that level of detail *if* the data is present in the scan. 

And nobody doing serious motion picture scanning does it to TIFF files. Sure, most scanners can scan to that format, but it's a nightmare to work with. DPX or EXR or even CinemaDNG make more sense for image sequences, or ProRes 4444 for containerized movie files. All of them will contain sufficient information to pull out that level of detail from an underexposed frame, as long as the scanner is capable of capturing that kind of dynamic range. 

Edited by Perry Paolantonio
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  • 3 weeks later...

They absolutely cherry-picked that sample. We scan prints on our Arriscan XT and our previous Arriscan and I have never, ever seen a result that poor. We also have Lasergraphics scanners and have not seen any real difference on print material of that magnitude in either direction. The Arriscan XT does have the latitude and the settings for print film, the original Arriscan was not designed for print film, but with the right settings did a stellar job anyway.

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The example shown has been up on their web site since I dunno - 2010 or maybe earlier? It compares a Director to a first-gen Arriscan. It wouldn't have been "cherry picked" at the time, but it is outdated, comparing it to an older model. 

In case nobody noticed, the basic Lasergraphics web site has looked the same since around 2009 or so, when we first started talking to them about buying a scanner. Clearly, that part of their marketing budget is not a huge priority...

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