Dan Baxter

I think the Neil one is sold here, and you can buy Kelmars as well and convert those to small format.

The main reason is that they were (1.) designed for restoration and (2.) far too slow to use something as fast drying as Isopropyl. The HDS+ solution on the other hand is designed not for professional restoration but for home movies. I would recommend you get a Neil Research Labs cleaning machine (Film-O-Clean).

The reason why this is a strange explanation is because this pricing and the options were shown to clients last year. Some of them would have bought their Archivists with every option they wanted from the start, and others would probably have said "I will buy these options later if we feel we need them". If a customer bought an Archivist last year, and they are later told they can no longer buy an important feature they were previously shown was an optional extra for their machine that would be outrageous behaviour. If you want to go to your car analogy that would be like the dealership telling you all the optional extras you can buy for your new car that you can have now or later if you wish, and then when you go back to them to get the extras you wanted a few months later they say "no we don't want to sell you that any more buy a more expensive car instead". The Archivist is modular like the ScanStation you configure it how you want with whatever options you want to buy, and you are supposed to be able to buy those options later if you wish. My point is that you and I both know there are existing machines with said features, so anyone who is interested in buying one is most certainly entitled in my opinion to say to the sales agent "I want the same options that you sold to other customers". I don't understand why you want to speak on LG's behalf - yes their new policy may very well be "no HDR on Archivists" but how is that going to look in practise? What are they going to say to customers who assert "you told me I could buy that option when I bought my machine"? Are they somehow going to keep track of who they showed that option to and who they didn't to create the haves and the have nots? What are they going to say to someone who says "my competitor across the street has that option"? Neither of us knows the answer to these questions, so stating that something is set in stone because the sales agent told you that in my opinion doesn't make it gospel, as far as I'm concerned that's just rhetoric the sales agent was told to say and proof will be in the pudding.

Look, I just want to clarify that I don't doubt for one second that you talked to Steve Klink today and he told you "no HDR on the Archivist". I doubt what he's telling you, not that he told you that. You could be right, maybe you can't buy it now with the features originally offered, but my hypothesis is that they would still sell the features to those who asked for them, they just aren't going to "offer them" upfront. I'm not trying to pick a fight over it, and I don't know why you'd be invested in saying it doesn't offer HDR (especially off the back of a single conversation with Steve Klink). If I knew someone who wanted to buy one I would tell them to push for the HDR option. There is a way to make it technically incapable of HDR and that's if they put in a lower-intensity light. If it can't flash bright enough for HDR then it won't be able to do it software license or not, so that's an outside possibility that they may have changed the light. That wouldn't prevent them putting in the brighter light though for customers asking for it. Regardless of what the options are now on new machines, some existing Archivists have the HDR license and others don't, the same is true for the ScanStation, and the ScanStation Personals do not have the HDR option available. The options on the Archivist are configured in the same way as the ScanStation, it's just that they all cost between 25-50% of what they cost on the ScanStation and that includes the mag audio readers etc (which so far as I'm aware those are completely identical).

My friend's Archivist has both 6.5K and HDR. As it has a fixed camera you only get 6.5K for 16mm not 8mm, and doing that locks you into scanning at a maximum speed of 15fps in SDR for 16mm so like I said the trade-off is you can't do high-speed scanning you can only do 15fps or slower for 16mm. I'm talking about the GD pricing, and I've sent you last year's price/configuration sheet for the ScanStation. I don't know what you're talking about when you say "Galileo Digital is the worldwide reseller". Their website might say that but all I understand that to mean is that they're the sales agent for where there isn't a regional one. I mean look at the GD website, it also claims that the Director is the world's only 10K scanner with HDR - that's not true either. Plus their website is like 6 or 7 years out of date - this page says the ScanStation has no HDR option. That was added in 2017 so that is at least 5 years out of date and probably more. And the Lasergraphic website has several misleading images with the Arriscan and makes false claims about it like this: "Unfortunately, conventional film scanners (e.g. ARRISCAN, DFT Scanity, and others) have been optimized to primarily scan negative film. Consequently, these scanners are simply incapable of properly scanning print film. The result is that shadow detail is either entirely missing or very noisy." That's not true at all, so I wouldn't really go off those websites as discerning truth.

All that would mean (if correct) is that they removed a feature previously available. It's the same as a ScanStation though, if you paid for the software license it's licensed to the machine and that's that. I'm not going to argue with you over this - even if Steve told you that I would think if you pushed them they would sell the HDR license since other companies already have it on their ones. Gencom is the regional sales agent, that is a primary source. Steve Klenk doesn't even have the Archivist on his website. You can do the same with the Archivist. Chrome rollers, gate options, warped-film kits, magnetic audio heads, etc. The Scanstation Personal also had options: optical sound reader, chrome rollers, magnetic sound heads, failed splice recovery software license, gate options. It's was as "modular" as anything. The list price on the 6.5K upgrade for the ScanStation is $25K right? My point was just that they could offer that as an upgrade if they wanted to (to either a ScanStation Personal or an Archivist customer). Yes the Archivist has a cheaper lens that is correct. I'll send you the 2021 price sheet for the ScanStation from GD and you can see for yourself it's an optional extra/module/product/whatever you want to call it. From what I understand prices go up this year so it'll be out of date of course.

It was an option on the SSP as well. "Had" it? They still have it. It was an option, it's still listed on Gencom's website, if it's not an option now that's utterly outrageous - how on earth is it acceptable to refuse to give a new customer an important feature that their competitors already have? If you have the software license the Archivist does two-flash HDR scanning, end of story. There are PLENTY of ScanStations that don't have the HDR software license as well (many still running the previous generation imager). All you're doing is confirming what I said earlier which is that the Archivist is an intentionally crippled ScanStation with some features removed. Lasergraphics have form here, they refused to let ScanStation Personal customers buy the HDR license or have a 6.5K camera upgrade. I'm not the one here speculating over the features, I know what they have and for what it's worth I'm not convinced they would refuse to give the same options to new customers. Sure, they might have physically different gates. Sure they might have different motors (what do they put in to a 16/8 ScanStation though like this one?) Yes it comes with plastic rollers if you don't pay for the Chrome ones. That does not make it a "completely different machine" at all. What makes it different is purely artificial like the fixed camera so you don't have the option to do 60fps 2K scanning on 16mm like you can on a full ScanStation. Well it did last year when it was launched: But even so let's say this is a mistake on the spec sheet, on the ScanStation it's an optional extra as it is, it's not built in to the base cost. I disagree. Why does the Archivist have 35mm rollers on it?

The two things you left out is 1. multiplicity of formats, and 2. scans to Prores completely stable. Those two features alone improve the overall value of the machine well above competing products. Please stop misinforming people. The Chrome Rollers are an option: I've removed the 2021 prices but they aren't expensive. The Archivist fully-loaded last year, with HDR with the Optical Soundtrack Reader (which you see clearly above), with the Chrome rollers and with the warped-film kit was about $60K USD with a 16/8 Scanstation with the same options costing more than twice that. More likely they're designed to be incompatible with the more expensive scanner.

Here's a quick comparison I don't mind sharing (35mm LPP-poly print): https://www.transfernow.net/dl/2022010542O3FZT2 Password: rind-liv_idly-laborer-catcher-foothold.projectionist I see a lot of claims about this scanner vs that but rarely does anyone actually do a proper show and tell. One of the scans is done on a modded Retroscan, the other on a Lasergrapics ScanStation. You should be able to work out which is which but in saying that it's still possible to improve the Retroscan's performance with another mod that hasn't yet been done. *In the unlikely event that someone wants to use this for a commercial purpose there will be a fee involved and I will provide the Prores.

You'd have to ask them. There's also a mod here but for a Retroscan: That company now has a HDS+ but that video shows a Retroscan Universal MkII with a different light and a wetgate mod. I appreciate the correction, thanks. I have to pull you up on this. I don't need to own a Holden Captiva to have an opinion on it, or to learn from the experiences of others. You sometimes make it sound like the ScanStation is a perfect machine and that Lasergraphics is a fantastic company, and that because you have a great experience you don't see why others may not share the same experience. Yes most of their users are happy, but also most users including professionals will have difficulty working out if their Lasergraphics is not delivering 100% of what it is capable of. I'd be happy to do a comparison sometime against your ScanStation. Just getting them to give you your training can be a pain and take perseverance. I also agree with what Robert said about the 5K model - there were several companies who oversold it as being more capable than what it was. It wouldn't take me long to find companies that claimed (or still do) that it was the best 4K scanner available. If the companies make that claim, they probably believe it, and so of course they are very satisfied with their scanners. But this is true for less capable scanners as well, there are companies that love their Blackmagic Cintels, their Retroscans, their Tobins, etc. Talk to most Retroscan owners and they've very satisfied with them. So in my opinion user satisfaction isn't necessarily objective. See? 100%. It's a trade-off between expensive and difficult, or cheap and easy and how satisfied you are with the results. I'll bet that more than one of their users probably asked for it. In 2021 the options for the Archivist were the IMX530 or the IMX342 in an Emergent Vision camera. The only options removed from the ScanStation were: 35mm, the editing table, the camera rail, P/T rollers. Everything else was available for them including HDR, the optical sound reader, and the full 6.5K camera the same as the ScanStations have (the 5.3K camera is probably a better choice anyway since you can scan twice as fast with it). Whether that's changed now I don't know, the website seems to indicate that all three of those options are no longer offered with new Archivists but you'd have to talk to the sales agents - Gencom still lists HDR as an option on their website. Also on the price, the exact same options are priced about 25-50% of what they cost on the ScanStation. They basically slashed the price of everything aggressively to make the product competitive against their main small-format competitor (Filmfabriek) but in doing so they revealed how over-priced the full ScanStation is.

The HDS+ is a very nice scanner. It doesn't have as many features as Lasergraphics, but it also doesn't have the issues with Lasergraphics. That's not entirely true, the ScanStations force image processing, you cannot access the raw image data. This is one of the issues friends of mine are currently looking into because you get detail crushed due to this, even when using two-flash HDR. The Archivist doesn't have an older imager. Lasergraphics just didn't make it clear to existing or potential customers what imager options they were using. The Archivist has no FPN issues. As I've mentioned before, it's easy to add the same type of "wetgate" to a ScanStation and people have done it. I know of two Archivists with a wet gate mod, this company advertises it on the website. Others have done the same thing with the Retroscans and other scanners. I have to disagree with you here. Perc is the liquid for wetgate printing. For projection you'd typically use Film Guard and Neil Research Laboratories advertises the Film-O-Clean as performing wetgate projection. From what I've seen regarding scanning Perc seems to soften the image a lot more than other solvents when used for wetgate scanning, so there's a trade-off between having the liquid with the perfect refractive index for the job, and how much that liquid will soften the scanned image (that's without taking into account the fact that Tyler has his scanner in his house so he's certainly not going to be using a toxic chemical like Perc for that).

I totally agree Robert, I tell people the same thing. Price a new CNC machine, or anything else used in a factory/workshop. The tools of the trade cost money.

If he can afford it. The Archivist starts at $40K with the word being that the price is going up in 2022. There's also an annual support contract. Also I'll pull Tyler up on this comment: Some of the scanners make contact with the picture area of the film all the time, and others don't. On the ScanStation the only part that makes contact is if you use the P/T rollers. The current film path has an oddly placed one on the take-up side which I'm not 100% sure is designed to be bypassed (it probably can be but it doesn't appear to be designed to be), but the normal two on the left can be bypassed. The Kinetta does not let you bypass the P/T rollers as they form part of the film path so you're forced to put film into contact with the scanner, and the Blackmagic Cintel uses "capstans" which are the rollers to either side of the gate that grip the film, plus you have to thread everything through the P/T rollers as well (the older Cintels have traditional sprocket-drives but those still have the mandatory P/T rollers as well). Putting film through a decent scanning machine is more gentile and safer compared to many projectors, and some of them can scan as fast or even faster than 24fps projection. But some of the low-cost machines like the Retroscan Universal MkI or the Wolverine scanners have poor tension control and can be rough as guts on film. As far as exposure to the elements goes I think that's a bit misleading. The slow scanners were traditionally operated in "cleanrooms" to reduce exposure to dust. Before archival film is scanned it's checked, prepped, and cleaned. This should happen before projection as well, but often film isn't cleaned before projection at all. Sometimes it would appear even for a show what they do is a test projection and decide whether the amount of dirt in the print is acceptable for the show. If a cinema is showing a first-run movie it's even worse - they typically just played the prints over and over and over without doing anything in-between shows to clean the films and the platter was invented to allow them to show a print for weeks on end.

That's right, and also it sounds like Perry (who bought a 2K ScanStation originally and upgraded it later) is probably paying the same price he always has for support, even though the price for service on a new similar machine is higher. Yes indeed it's a business decision, the same as not offering the "35/16 Archivist". It's completely stupid not to upgrade the camera to a Sony and artificially limits those machines. It's interesting you like yours for prints. Yeah that's right, I don't think the CFA scanners were designed for restoration and that more professional use. They clearly have features that are dumb for restoration and intended for archives or home movies or streaming or for users that don't need restoration quality scans like noise reduction. I completely agree with you on that Robert. Since I don't own one I can only relay the experience of other users. The dumb default settings in the software doesn't help, and you can't just make your own defaults either. I can name a pretty major company who does not know that "filtering" is sharpening their scans, I won't do that publicly but send me a PM if you want to know about that. Proper documentation would help a lot, allowing the user to set their own defaults would help, but what helps the most of course is when you have an owner/operator that knows instinctively how film should look and will do extensive tests on their machine to determine what works best and what doesn't. I reckon the SSP was just designed to compete against the Cintel. The Archivist must be designed to take on Filmfabriek. The 35/16 Archivist would have been a problem product really IMO. Yes you're right, it needs to be cheap and fast for archives with large volumes of materials, and dailies of course. True RGB is sharper, better for badly faded film, and some of them will do a damage matte which is an important feature for restoration work. Different markets and clientele.

Gencom is the regional distributor. The the technician is supplied from NZ for all LG customers in the region, whether the tech works for Gencom or LG directly I couldn't tell you. GD is the "worldwide agent" for when there isn't a regional one, honestly half the time you sound as if you're parroting their marketing without bothering to explain about the "fluff". The support contract for a ScanStation here is more than double what it costs in the us which is $9.5K/year on a new one and +25% to start a new contract on an existing machine: That's straight off their 2021 price sheet, if you're paying less then I can tell you that is not what new customers are quoted. Contact me privately and I'll tell you how much exactly they quote here, but I can tell you right now it's more than twice $9.5K. I can give you the full 2021 US price sheet for the ScanStation.

They do not make it easy that's for damn sure. I don't own one I suggest you talk to the actual users about that not me. I'm just stating the facts, I know of two brand new 2021 machines with the same issue and LG did not inform the users at all that this issue may occur or how to identify it. The only way a small user would know this is by talking to a more experienced company or if they really understand what the technology is capable of. Why would you tell people that Arri charge $50K per year for support? That's from the 2020 Arri price list page 433. If you're going to trash-talk other companies please at least reference what you're talking about because everything I have heard about Arri is completely at odds with what you say about the company. Prime support runs to about $30K per year but parts are included and you have choice of a less expensive service option. €7,700/yr is less than what Lasergraphics charge for support on a Scanstation, and LG charge 25% more to start a service contract if you have an existing machine without one. From Galileo Digital the service contract is about $9.5K per year and that's fairly standard and in-line with Arri and with Kinetta, but from Gencom the price is more than double that. So where in the world you buy a Lasergraphics makes a big difference to what support costs, I have not heard of other companies doing that. On the less expensive scanners like the Blackmagic Cintel or the Filmfabriek HDS+ there is no support contract you are asked to pay.

The new ones have a colour issue that requires a tech come out and fix it. They do not tell their customers this or how to check if they've got this problem, they are not at all proactive in that way. How an average small company that is using one, for example, as their workhorse for internal scanning for bluray releases is supposed to work that out is well beyond me. They have never allowed the ScanStation Personal customers to have another camera. Tell me how it was intuitive to them in 2015 that they would not be supported and allowed to buy improvements to their scanners? They were not told when they purchased them that "this is a crippled scanner that we won't support" had they been told that upfront they may have chosen another product. All I'm saying about the Archivist is buyer beware because they have a history here with what they did with the ScanStation Personal. The ScanStation Personal and the Archivist are both ScanStations that have been crippled by design with the table removed and the camera rail removed and then whatever features locked out in software. They're exactly the same machine just crippled with features removed and cost way less. The Archivist is marketed towards Archives. Archives have a high turnover and their operators may be trained in general archive duties and not film specifically. It should have a user manual. The Arriscan has a manual, the Cintel has a manual, my washing machine has a user manual, my car has one. If I want to make a water crossing I can open up my manual and find out what depth my car is rated for - that isn't intuitive to me as the owner I don't know what it is I would look it up in my owners manual before driving though water. If I don't know what a particular light on the dash means I can look that up. This is true. Blackmagic's development for their scanner is very limited, and a lot of their users tend to expect way more than is realistic.

I don't work for a scanning company or anything, but what I understand "best light" to mean is they will stop the scan and adjust for exposure or re-calibrate to different film types as necessary in the scan. For dailies that's probably less meaningful unless you really need to stop and adjust for incorrect exposure or something like that. For restoration I imagine it would be quite important if you have an original cut camera negative with different types of film spliced together or something along those lines. Maybe the negative was repaired many decades later or something by splicing in a new section for example.

Do you mean the Archivist? I have the full confidential draft price chart from April for it, but I think they are probably adjusting their prices on it you'll have to talk to LG to get a proper quote. The Archivist is a simplified ScanStation and all the prices are generally around 1/3-1/4 of the corresponding cost on the ScanStation. What that shows is that the ScanStation could be priced a lot lower if the company wanted to do that. Lasergraphics have put the price on it up a lot since it was launched. They're also a pain to deal with in terms of buying these things in the first place and getting support etc, case in point the brand new ones have an issue which requires that a tech adjusts the machine to correct - the average user probably wouldn't know that and they're not known to be a proactive company when it comes to properly informing their users about issues they may develop and stuff like that. I only know this because I know some people in professional restoration so they know what needs to be done. The other thing about them is they come with very basic and limited documentation, there is no proper user manual. Have a look at the Cintel User Manual on page 18. I'm aware of a user who acquired a ScanStation second-hand and was focusing the scans to the perforations. You get better focus and a sharper scan by focusing to the grain, but that's not necessarily intuitive to an average user who didn't get the training and has never operated a scanner before. Blackmagic explains how to focus the scanner clearly in their user manual, so the fact that a $100,000+ scanner doesn't come with proper documentation is quite outrageous really. To show you how the default settings are not intuitive, have a look at this screenshot (these are not the default settings FYI but the sharpening is on default): Do you see the setting for artificially sharpening the scan? The setting is called "Filtering/Aperture Correction". Many companies have no idea what that does, you have to set it it to 0 to prevent the software from artificially sharpening the scan, but the default setting is 0.4. You get a "punchy" looking image, but it's not what you want for professional restoration. One of the people I know was sent a scan for restoration from their client which was done with a well-known scanning/restoration company off their ScanStation and it is artificially sharpened. They asked the client if they could get the film re-scanned without the sharpening and the client said they don't think that their scan is sharpened. Then the client talked to the company that did the scan and the company told them that their scan isn't sharpened as well. This is for a commercial job, the result of this goes onto bluray for customers to buy, so the fact that a very well known large company has no idea that their scanner is artificially sharpening their scans I think demonstrates the fact that these machines really should come with proper operating documentation, not just a two-day zoom training course. With those caveats, yes the Archivist as it is is amazing value, although 8mm won't have the greatest resolution so it's mainly designed for 16mm really.

It depends on the machine, but with many of them you have absolutely no control over framing and with most you can't scan "edge-to-edge" (the Kinetta makes that a selling point since some Archives want that). A DCS XENA you probably have full control over, Robert can answer on that, but on a Blackmagic, a Lasergraphics or the line-scan scanners like the GoldenEye and Scanity I don't think the user has any control at all. The overscan is whatever is set in the factory where it's designed and manufactured. Even if you repositioned the camera in the Blackmagic Cintel yourself the scanning software (Resolve) wouldn't support scanning 16mm above 2K the software would need to be rewritten, and Lasergraphics has a hard software lock to restrict you from doing anything like that with a ScanStation Personal or the Archivist. You would need someone to write third-party capture software to do anything like that. Remember, most of the older machines only ever supported two formats at most (typically 16mm and 35mm). It sounds like your film is going out of frame because the Moviestuff scanners don't have gates to guide the film to the correct location. There's a 3rd-party product coming for the new ones next year (the current model Retroscan).

A friend of mine has one. What do you want to know? It's just a crippled ScanStation sold at a fraction of the price of the full ScanStation. They removed the editing table and the camera rail, but it had all the other features available including the warped film kit and two-flash HDR. I'm guessing that new features developed for the ScanStation won't be offered on it though. I don't remember if it's missing the P/T rollers as it would appear on the Lasergraphics website, but it wouldn't take much to add your own as the rest of the film path is exactly the same as the ScanStation, it's a "Module" it's called the "Scanstation film transport module" the only thing different will be the sticker on it says "Archivist" instead of "ScanStation" like you see with this one: You can actually see on the website quite clearly that the Film Transport Module is just the same 35mm one as the ScanStation, because if it was different then the rollers would be smaller to be designed only for small gauge film. Given their history with the infamous ScanStation Personal I would not expect them to be making any development for the Archivist or to offer new features etc on it, I would think that how it comes now is how it will always come. Case in point - the camera is fixed so you get lower resolution for 8mm, but it doesn't have to be they could put in the camera rail (i.e. the ScanStation 6.5K Camera Module) and support 35mm as it is but they won't because the scanner is intentionally designed to be limited.

It's IMX342, but there are other newer imagers now including the 5.3K one (IMX530).

Oh I don't disagree with you at all - the Sony imagers are light-years ahead of the Blackmagic ones for scanning. The camera in the Cintel is a Blackmagic. I can't tell you anything more than that, I don't think it's been changed since it was launched. Lasergraphics currently use Emergent cameras with the Sony Pregius imagers:

To be honest with you, I think they are well overpriced as it is and Lasergraphics is putting the price UP next year as well. The only reasonable way for a small company (or an individual) to get one in 2022 is with a clear business plan which you would probably want to prove to yourself first with a cheaper scanning machine. As for the cost of them, you really need to select only the options you absolutely need and get what you don't later on.

A cintel? No I haven't, I haven't used either "extensively". I don't think Blackmagic will put a Sony imager into their product, even if they did it would be the 4K one not a 6.5K camera. 6.5K would increase the hardware requirements for the host computer too much. Honestly, if anyone is expecting them to invest the R&D into it to make it equal to a Lasergraphics that costs multiple time more then those expectations are falling well outside of reality.