Robert Houllahan

I have a friend who has a small shop which mostly does videotape stuff. Ed has a Retro-Pro (15 FPS) and as someone who owns a lab and has five scanners... Spirit 4K, Spirit 2K, Xena 5K, Xena 4K and a Scan Station 5K.... The Retro machine Ed has looks pretty decent and he mostly does 8mm home movies with it, I took a look at what he was scanning a few times I was over there and the machine and scans seemed ok and competent. Until BMD loses the Sprockets and the bad 4K sensor with fixed pattern noise I would not call the BMD Cintel really a "professional" scanner. Also it is very much less than 2K for 16mm. Even Scan Stations with the 5K CMOS sensor have issues with fixed pattern noise, hopefully LaserGraphics will have some kind of program to replace all those 5K chips with 6.5K Sony Pregius sensors. I am amazed at how much 8mm film is out there to support this kind of machine and I think the scanners will just get better and faster and less expensive over time.

Seems like a reasonable price to charge for such a thing, you want a premium and slow to make scan expect to pay a high price for it.

The previous CCD they used had tap balance issues and the 5K is truly a piece of junk, maybe Perry got the one good CMOSIS chip but the basic problems with the FPN on the 5K sensor are fundamental to the design of the sensor which was made for traffic stop cameras. LaserGraphics is not the only scanner manufacturer who traded picture quality for speed, MWA-Nova uses the 5K CMOSIS as do a few others. Also the BMD Cintel uses a junk 4K sensor with allot of Fixed Pattern Noise too. Cheap, Fast, Good .... pick any two.

No trouble for a lab that runs B&W Neg and the scan is just a regular 35mm 4-perf format so any motion picture scanner will scan that.

Yeah the sensors are getting better, the 6.5K Sony Pregius is going into the Scan Station and Xena etc. Low noise and fast performance with great DR and that chip is about $8500 in a machine vision camera. The 6K chip and sprocketless in the BMD would make it a contender. All the digital cameras and all the scanners will be about the same soon ? Still think that a true RGB scan like the Spirit 4K or a Director or Xena with a B&W chip and sequential RGB will be a premium and get the most out of a film scan color wise.

I think these are all really valid points, but I know a guy with one of the previous version scanners and he runs it allot for small gauge film for home movie people who also have allot of video tape stuff. I think scanning is on a better for much less $ trajectory and just a half decade ago a sub $10K 2K scanner was a bit of a pipe dream. Did BMD announce anything about the Cintel? Now sprocketless? The Cintel-2 still has the same film transport and I see no sprocket-less options on the BMD web site. I think with a few tweaks that will be a good machine but the 4K sensor in it now is a pile of junk.

If it is Ilford it is B&W and B&W can be run with allot of different chemistry and any lab (like us) that runs B&W Negative should be able to process it.

Looks pretty nice wonder what camera but seems pretty good for the price.

1965 16mm Plus-X Pan-Chromatic Negative film emulsion 7231 and it was originally rated at.... I am not sure as it does not have an ASA rating on the can... Hmm.

B&W definitely holds up longer than color. I shot some Plus-X from 1966 recently and I shot it as 25iso outdoors and it looked great.

well VHS really did not come into prevalence till the early 80's despite being released in 1977. Films were probably transferred to an intermediate tape format from a Rank-Cintel Mk3 Flying spot CRT Telecine. The master tape (quad, etc) was then sent by a video Distribution Amp to a rack of VHS recorders... Porn drove this effort....

There is a new Sony Pregius 6.5K CMOS sensor just became available and will be making it's way into scanners soon, I assume the Scan Station Kinetta and the Xena will be using it soon enough. The new Sony Pregius line is far better than the CMV50000 5K sensor used allot currently in scanners as much as 12dB better dynamic range and for S8mm figure a real 6K possible scan of the camera gate. https://www.imperx.com/cmos-cameras/C6440/

We see that all the time with the K3. Autoload never worked on the camera well like a Filmo70 or Bolex and most K3's which work have had the Autoload formers removed. Also the pressure plate in those cameras often need to be fitted better to the gate as it can stick and loose the loop. My first 16mm camera at NYU was a K3 and I did a ton of work trying to get the mechanism to run smoothly and not lose the loop but eventually got a better 16mm camera. YMMV on those.

Tri-X and Orwo stocks develop really nicely and at the same time/temps in a continuous process or as XX neg. Foma needs a bit of a different setup as its emulsion tens to be a bit softer and more hydroscopic so drying times area bit longer. XX Neg looking good has allot to do with what chemistry it is developed in and we did allot of tests with chemistry when we ran the 1985 S16mm film and the Loui CK 35mm film to get the most pleasing grain results.

XX Neg can be tricky but also some great results can be had from it. Here is a Super-16mm film we developed and scanned to 4K on the Xena 5K machine which has gotten some really good attention.

Well I have two last Gen Spirit 2K/4K machines and one was delivered in 2007 and the other was delivered in 2008 and someone paid a total of $3.2 Million dollars for them. A fully kitted out Scan Station is about $200K and I think a Director is maybe $500K and a Scannity is $1M The BMD Cintel is $30K? And it would probably be pretty decent if they put the 4.6K sensor in it instead of the junk UHD/4K one. Pretty significant drops in pricing on motion picture scanners, a BMD or a Scan Station Personal at $30-$60K is even in the range of an enthusiast IMO. FPN is not a "range" it is grid like noise in the sensor and usually shows up in the shadows of a positive film scan and in the hilites on a negative film scan. Look at FPN in the shadows on cameras like the REDs for examples.

The new Sony sensor is 4112x3008 so good for UHD resolution as the scanner has to "see" the perforation(s) for registration. There is another Sony 6.5K sensor just becomming available but will not hit 30FPS scan speed, more like 15FPS but really good sensors. Maybe BMD will put the 4.6K CMOS sensor in the Cintel and then it will be ok. You can also get the 5K Scan Station but in single flash mode you will get FPN sometimes (not nearly as bad as the BMD) or run 2-Flash at 15FPS. Lots of good choices in scanners these days and I think it will only get better as new sensors arrive, a buyers market.

I had an Imagica Imager-XEplus which I gave away as it was slow as cold molasses and the Toshiba CCDs in those go bad and the one I had was noisy and could only pass a FPN calibration one out of five times. I would also give away that BlackMagic Cintel as it has tons of FPN issues and the "HDR" means somehow that you have to run the film through twice? So not the elegant multi flash of a Scan Station. The Spirit 2K/4K is the industry workhorse and is a true RGB 16bit scanner which is pretty fast (to DPX) and can be really reliable especially if you have a parts machine. When talking to Steve about getting a Scan Station I would recommend getting the new Sony 4K CMOS sensor instead of the 5K CMOSIS one as they all have low DR and noise issues. The 2-Flash "HDR" on the Scan Station basically overcomes the problems with the 5K sensor so if you do go with that 5K chip I would not run the machine in any other mode than 2-flash. Other than that the Scan Station is a dead reliable workhorse Bayer sensor scanner. They really run like a top day after day.. But LaserGraphics also makes the Director which is true RGB.

We do a fair amount of 4K / 5K 16mm (Super, Standard and Ultra) scans Definitely more detail and not just noise/grain IMO True RGB scans often show more detail and sometimes those are a bit to revealing compared to 4K CFA scanner scans which have less detail. Also there are differences between scans which have more detail but look less sharp and scans which have a bit of sharpening added.

Maybe email Cinelab London they are running the negative for Mr. Bond.

Sorry late to this... I made a battery adapter to use Ryobi 18V Li batteries on my XTRProd. I used a Aaton battery and fabricated up a Ryobi flashlight which mated to the Aaton battery. I put a DC to DC regulator in to clamp the 18V battery down to 16V to feed the camera. I also put a 12V regulator on it and a D-Tap for accessories like a monitor or Micro-Force. I am building one for someone now based on a smaller Milwauke 12V battery.

LTO-5 and LTo-6 drives and media have become much more affordable, interfacing them to a machine can be a trick as can the LTO software, especially on MAC but then you have a good backup with a decent amount of storage for each tape that will be recoverable in five or ten years, possibly more so fewer migration steps to be taken. Optical Discs are everything that Perry said especially the part about not having a drive that works in five or ten years.

Yeah Reversal bath not neg bath then you have Hi Contrast direct duplicate.

There are a couple of ways to make a positive from Tri-X these days, a inter-negative and print which is the "right" way to do it and will retain good sharpness and contrast. 3234 is a fine dupe neg stock and Orwo also has dupe neg stocks. We have also made "Dirty Dupes" as work-prints for customers which are basically printing Tri-X to print stock and then running the print stock as a negative to make a one step positive, this is very contrasty but works as a workprint. Olde Thread

I suppose then LaserGraphics can discontinue the trur RGB Director then... ?