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How long do the big boy 16mm cine' scanners last before needing service?


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Big name 16mm cine' scanners - how many feet can be scanned before they need service? 

And by service, I mean...a major repair.

 

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Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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Electronic components seem to be the achilles heel of many appliances nowadays. For mechanical wearing surfaces, there are some splendidly robust metals available and surface finishing has been a fine art for many years. Modern automotive engine valves often endure the lifetime of the entire car.  My money would be on camera sensors becoming obsolete and being upgraded before they actually lay down for the count. Pixels do go hot. Capacitors do age and not in a beautiful way. Electric motors seem to endure for years if the quality is built in. Simple plain oilite bearings and ball bearings so long as they are not drowned by water can go on for years. The film transports of old telecines are enduring long enough for the machines to become rebirthed with modern electronics. Steenbeck flatbeds seem to live forever mechanically and it is perishable stuff like electronics and synthetic cogbelts which bring them low. A few old ones have burned down. In stepping scanners, Intermittent transports may eventually wear enough to go off spec. Maybe this can be adjusted for or replacement parts required. I guess it may depend upon how much any given manufacturer wants to extract revenue from after-sales product support. Finally, any appliance depends upon the care shown by the operator as to how long it will keep running. As to how long a machine wikll keep on going. - that is anyone's guess. There are two basic usage models for any machinery. Drive until it until drops then rebuild/replace or operate it within a regular maintenance schedule and replace parts within their lifetime before they fail.

Edited by Robert Hart
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We have had our ScanStation for almost 10 years now. Only one thing has ever required mechanical/electronic repair: the camera in our optical track reader failed about 5 years ago and needed to be replaced. I can't speak to other equipment though.

As Robert pointed out though, upgrades probably head off some eventual failures. In the 10 years we've had the machine, we're on our third sensor, due to upgrades (from 2k to 5k to 6.5k). In the scanstation, there are a lot of moving parts in the camera assembly, and the upgrade entails replacement of the entire unit, not just the camera.

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 A billion feet?

Two of the Spirit scanners I have came from a Indian post house in LA that scanned Bollywood films for years with them, probably a few hundred million feet of film or more. Both Spirit scanners worked when they arrived years ago. One became a parts machine when I got the 4K from CPC London which had presumably also scanned hundreds of millions of feet of film.

The two Xena scanners started life as a Cintel Mk3 and a URSA and the Mk3 was from the mid 1980s and the URSA Y-Front from 1998? and both probably also scanned hundreds of millions of feet of film before being remade into Xena scanners. The electronics worked fine and the transports were and are in great condition, perhaps having received a bearing replacement somewhere along the line of their 30-40+ year life.

Newer scanners like the Scan Station have much more simple electronics and the only problem I had with the first one I got was the capstan encoder somehow worked it's way loose from the Capstan motor causing some odd behavior, this was fixed by screwing the encoder back down.

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  • 8 months later...

Modern scanners sound very reliable. Thanks for the info. I had thought they had more issues with heavy use, since you had mentioned you pay thousands of $ per year for tech support. Tech support must be for imaging questions and not so much in the repair dept. 

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On 11/16/2023 at 3:39 PM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Modern scanners sound very reliable. Thanks for the info. I had thought they had more issues with heavy use, since you had mentioned you pay thousands of $ per year for tech support. Tech support must be for imaging questions and not so much in the repair dept. 

Support contracts pay for software upgrades and for continued development. There are multiple approaches that have taken place, some companies require that you have an active support contract to get replacement parts, others like Arri will give you a discount on replacement parts and priority service rather than require you have a contract to get them (that's my understanding anyway), FilmFabrik and Blackmagic and Moveistuff do not require a support contract and support is built into the base cost of the scanners and then provided for free (although you may have to pay for major software updates). This is also the case with older machines, so you need to know your stuff and whether the replacement parts you'll need to get will be available or not. That's why some old scanners and telecines will sell, albeit not for very much now, and others won't. The ones that will sell for $5,000 or more are the ones you can still maintain today without spending a fortune, and anything else is effectively more of a burden than it's worth and obviously much, much more limited in what actually do compared to a modern scanner.

FF have a new model scanner hitting the market next year so keep an eye out for that. If you know anyone thinking about buying a RetroScan I'd suggest they should probably wait until next year and in the meantime have a chat with FF about commissioning a scanner from them. MS have really dropped the ball post-pandemic. They have been unable to source their parts, people have been paying in full up front and then waiting in some cases longer than a year for delivery of their scanner - and many will be disappointed when they get them and it breaks down after they put a couple of dozen reels through it (which is not much film).

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Thanks for the scoop Dan!

You would think FF would be talking about their new products. People may be buying something else instead of waiting for the new FF products to come online. After reading about the problems with the current FF scanner I'd be scared to get one until it was out for some time. These problems with the FF are pretty basic to the scanner operation, such as scratching film or not working out of the box. It reminded me of a ring box I had bought a while back. If you put rings in it the lid would not shut all the way. Did anyone ever try it before mass producing it?

I'm wondering how big the scanner market is. Can it fit the classic U.S. Ponzi scheme market of endless growth and consumption in a finite world?

I got an email the other day from a small scanning company out west saying they will be shutting down shop for lack of biz. It seems the market for these types of scanners are either archives, commercial scanning companies specializing in 8mm and 16mm or small indie filmmakers. Hollywood is not buying them unless it is the top end Lasergraphics. Don't you think this is going to be an issue with scanning manufactures, with more and more scanning operations coming online and less and less 8mm and 16mm film to scan?

 

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