Dan Baxter

Well I'm not in the industry, but LaserGraphics has made a number of improvements recently to their host software and yes they have a warped film gate option. On the ScanStation it's very expensive and on the Archivist it's less expensive. That could be (in part) because of the use of derlin rollers instead of chrome, I'm not sure. Of course they put the price up. They launched it at a price that would have infuriated a number of their existing ScanStation customers. I'd say the Axion scanner (or a Filmfabriek scanner) is far more suitably priced for an individual over a LaserGraphics. I do not think it's likely that CUImaging will do anything "better" than FF at this time. It can do 60fps according to the website, so it can do things that FF can't, but 60fps is what you use for low-end inspection work or to generate quick proxies and stuff like that, you'd never use it for a "finishing scan". No they won't. They'll spend the next 2-3 years (minimum) working on supporting and improving their existing scanner. There is no way that they have worked out all the issues ahead of time, they're going to be relying on feedback from their customers to troubleshoot and reproduce errors or unexpected behaviour and diagnose and roll out fixes. Note that it doesn't even come with a 1 year warranty - so it probably has an annual support contract like most other companies. FF builds the price of support into the cost of their scanner and charge extra for upgrading the host software, but they don't charge an annual support contract. FYI from the website: "The Axion Scanner and its accessories are classified as professional equipment designed for trained operators in environments such as commercial, archival, and studio settings. They are not intended for home or general consumer use." Those terms are not legal in my country, the ACL will override them (all goods under $100K and every motor vehicle regardless of price is captured) and if they use Gencom then they'll know this. I don't think changing formats will be difficult. It looks like it has dual-format rollers, so the only format that may be "difficult" is 9.5mm if you need to change all the rollers for it. Focusing the camera may be a manual task and a PITA, but that would probably be about it.

Well the original design was the Müller HM73 before FilmFabriek came along to commercialise the idea, so really that design is now 15 years old. Here's an early FF Müller (probably the first model after the partnership and before any sound heads had been developed for it):

There's an entirely new film scanner that's just hit the market (pre-orders started a couple of days ago): Axion Scanner from CUImaging OpCo, LLC. Base price of $18K it has 8mm, 16mm, magnetic sound heads, software optical sound extraction, and "wetgate" with a pump (which I presume uses isopropyl alcohol). Supports both reels and cores. They advertise a warped film clamp/gate option as well, but it's not clear if that's production-ready or not.

They quite literally sell aftermarket parts for the Restroscan Universal Mk2, I think it's fair to say that's what they used and that they had technical issues running a large 35mm reel through it.

Looks to me like they use a Retroscan. Just ask for your money back.

That was a bit misleading of an answer FWIW. The ScanStation 65 is really a different machine altogether, and on a normal one there's no option for a 22mm gate so that's one format not supported. If you knew how much the ScanStation 65 really costs then you would definitely think twice about it before buying one. There's really no adequate way to answer your question as it depends on the business.

Well you can't expect people to be sharing their client's work etc here (unless it's archiving work publicly uploaded), here's some 28mm film that was shot in 1916: Obviously that's a print not the original negative, the negs are probably long gone by now!

If you mean the 4K production camera from 2014/15, that has a rolling-shutter. Yes it may be the same CMOSIS imager, but it's in completely different camera with a global shutter. Well, "understand the limitations" is half the problem IMHO. It's never going to be the workhorse machine that a LaserGraphics is, nor is it specialised for restoration. I think you could say that it was a good scanner when it hit the market for dailies work, but I don't think you can really say that now. There are so many other 35mm scanners on the market, I personally don't see Blackmagic lasting a lot longer in the market unless they come with a complete redesign. The new Korn Manufaktur Filmscanner supports 6K for 35mm, 6K for 16mm, and 4K for 8mm (spec sheet), supports 9.5mm now (17.5mm is listed as supported on the spec sheet but can't be ordered through the website) and does optical and magnetic audio as well. It's also capstanless as well as sproketless (direct-drive film transport). I don't know what the price on it is, but according to the specs it only scans to 12-bit DNG which is a good choice for a new product with a Bayer sensor. Even the Cintel can't do that, it has to go to .CRI. Obviously I don't know anything "real-world" about it in operation. You can dump out the raw JPEG tiles and read the metadata for yourself from individual .CRIs using this app (Windows-only). I don't have any CRI files myself, but you can email me some if you prefer and I can open them myself. Yeah Resolve doesn't do any work while scanning as you say, but it does the work when opening the files. The pixel-shift for optical stabilisation is in the metadata, so it's already calculated on scanner, but my understanding is the tiles themselves aren't yet shifted. I could be mistaken as you'd need to dump the raw JPEG tiles to check. Anyway it's not surprising that it works the way it does, if your host computer meets the bare minimum specifications then running any additional tasks would risk dropping frames.

Thanks for the clarity!

There's a heap of labs missing from your website (and some of them aren't actually labs either). In the US and Canada you can add: Film-Tech, Kodak Lab NYC, Cinelab, The Negative Space, Frame Discreet, and there's a bunch of LA labs like Fotokem, MTI Film, Pro8mm, etc. I'd also make the point that many of the film companies are run by people with a love/passion for film whether they're artists or not. 🙂

Well I wouldn't call it a "trap", that's how most scanners worked and it's why upgrading or changing the optical module costs $90K+ in some of them. I'm sure some of it was existing Cintel International IP too. You should look up the costs involved to replace one of the logic boards in a Spirit or a Scanity before declaring it the superior design. There are advantages and disadvantages, and if you're using an 8K CCD line sensor for 1080p, 2K and 4K then of course you want to stack it in the scanner and down sample - but that design is obsolete. All the new scanners use area sensors, and they are all able to make use the full resolution of their cameras. As you say the only limiting factor there is the bandwidth for the raw data flow. The FPGAs/logic boards in video cameras are generalisable. In other words, you can use the same (or nearly the same) components in a heap of different products. The scanner-specific tasks like perf detection and stabilisation to the perfs are not of any use to any other product. The pixel-shift stabilisation isn't done in hardware anyway, the calculation for it is done in hardware but that is stored in the .CRI metadata and then Resolve does the actual stabilisation. You're also more dependent on the manufacturer with the logic boards. If they leave the market, or don't provide support, then you need access to another machine to copy the "software" off the FPGA to repair your own one. The only reason Blackmagic has a custom CMOSIS 4K camera is because they wanted a 4K CMOS camera for their machine in 2014, they wanted it to do 24fps, and they wanted to sell it for $30K retail. Those goals are the limiting factor. They've never sold the machine-vision camera retail for other applications. I imagine the next one will be exactly the same - they may use a better sensor, but they won't sell the camera itself retail. That's not a clever design when they can use an off-the-shelf product instead. And they're not going to sell it as a product because they don't compete in the machine-vision camera space and that market is already very competitive. I don't know how you can say that the noisy CMOSIS cameras sold in a brand new scanner in 2025 is acceptable. LaserGraphics moved on from the 5K CMOSIS that they were using almost six years ago. Kinetta and DCS support what the customer wants and Filmfabriek uses Sony Pregius S. Blackmagic are quite literally the only scanner manufacturer that is still using an optical module from 10 years ago in brand new scanners. Whoever told you that was probably making assumptions. How do you do "most of the debayer" inside or outside? You either do it or you don't. The CRIs are 12bit encoded using JPEG-SOF3 (lossless), not debayered, and not pre-stabilised either - they contain metadata for the frame-by-frame pixel shift to be done in software. So they're really not doing as much as you think they are inside the scanner. In saying this, part of the core issue is that basically nothing supports .CRI other than Resolve. If Blackmagic delivered .DNG instead they'd solve a lot of problems, but they chose to use their own propriety/not-well-documented format.

Well of course there's optical calibration involved when the optics are changed, but are you saying they don't have a simple piece of software to recalibrate the machine? What happens if your scanner can't focus correctly at the moment and requires recalibration - surely the user can contact support and be talked through how to recalibrate their machine's optics? That's my understanding too, but "in hardware" is still software in a chip on a logic board that can be updated when necessary. I do not think they can support any other camera with the existing hardware, if they change the camera they change more than just the software on the logic boards which means you're buying a new scanner. I wouldn't say that approach is "simple", I would say that bypassing a stack of logic boards and having a beefy host PC take over most of the computational tasks simplifies a lot of the design. The only thing the hardware needs to do is protect the film and its own hardware if the host computer crashes or does something unexpected. The preference now with most of the other machines is to do the complicated computational tasks in the PC. I think that from Blackmagic's POV there's a certain amount of the computational tasks need to be done inside the machine in order to lower the hardware requirements to that of an average PC. A big selling point was that the customer can plug it into a Macbook. I doubt there's any appetite to take what already works inside the machine outside of it and give it to the host computer if they don't have to. Any additional CPU and GPU resources can be spent doing other things.

The 4K Director is CCD so it's different tech entirely. The new ones are CMOS which make them much faster. Company3 has Arris I think. 2 flash on an Arri is as good as it gets in terms of dynamic range. Prints rarely have 4K resolution in them, but as you say they are much denser than negatives. When you say you have a "pretty dense" print - do you mean more dense than you'd normally expect in a projection print?

All these unrealistic expectations. Blackmagic have just increased the base price from $32K to $35K, the hardware audio reader adds $4K to that price. I don't see them going back to $30K. They already have "sproketless transport" and what you're calling "digital registration". As for doing everything else a LaserGraphics can do - that's unrealistic, and you can already buy an Archivist so what's the point? If Blackmagic produced a product that does everything an Archivist can do it would surely have to cost $100,000 retail not ~$40K which is significantly more than the Archivist. They have great documentation, there's no problem there at all. There's obviously a bit more to it than simply changing the optics as the 8/16 model drops support for 35mm entirely. If it was as simple as offering a second optics module to put into an existing scanner then they wouldn't need to sell it as a separate product. Also they're not actually using the "full imager" for 16mm either. If they were then 16mm would work the way that 35mm works on the 35mm Cintels where only half the perfs are visible: The only reason not to do this would be if the 16mm optical perf registration doesn't work, meaning that it relies on seeing the full perforation for 16mm optical pin registration. You'd expect that'd be the case for the 35mm scanner, but there's no reason for it to be the case for a 16/8 scanner that is truly designed for 16mm. As you say, there isn't any major changes made to accommodate this, and I suspect the reason why is that the 16mm and 8mm optical perf registration use the same logic and the R&D budget doesn't allow them to do it differently just for the 16/8 model.

That machine was obsolete when it was new. It's a line-sensor machine, but its line-sensor is only 4K which wasn't the industry standard for "4K scanning" and they're notoriously unreliable. I can't think of a later machine that was line-scan, unless we're talking something that already existed like the Scanity, but as an entirely new product/model to the market I think it may have been the last one? The limitations of a fixed line-sensor design are well documented (and CCD vs CMOS). Honestly though Daniel, it would take you a few seconds of work on Google to get the answers you want. On Digital Vision's own website the latest software release for the Goldeneye scanners is 2018.1.004 released on 2018-03-12. That's seven years ago and Digital Vision is a post production software company.