Dan Baxter

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.

What I mean is that there are older models (it's a scanner launched in 2013) many small companies bought them when they were cheaper, and some upgraded them to 6.5K later on. I know two.

For 35mm it's fine, but it's low-resolution for 16mm. It's not an archival scanner though so anything older than 40 years or so or prints etc doesn't look great scanned on it. Tyler is completely right about delivering the scan to clients. You would definitely have to convert the .CRI into a more universal format like Prores for clients. They replaced the lead developer earlier this year I believe, so yes they're working on it - but of course they have a limited budget for R&D and they have priorities for their scanner that guide their decisions (e.g. keeping the price low). Blackmagic bought out Cintel that's why they call their scanner Cintel.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here Tyler. I'm aware of several ScanStations that are owned by small companies or operators that do their own thing and do not advertise that they even have them. Some of them are used by companies that do low-cost home movie transfers. But don't be fooled, the quality varies on those machines a lot depending on which model it is, what options it has, and how it's operated. As far as Archival scanning goes, I'd agree with you that many of the larger vendors do that work - however it's important to point out they have this much more available to them now, whereas they didn't have it available a decade ago due to the costs.

The only "cheap" scanner that is within reach/affordable for consumers and still decent quality which I'm aware of is the Pictor Pro: The only other decent "low budget" option (assuming you're not building the entire scanner from scratch) would be to buy a Retroscan Universal MkII and modify it, in my estimation you'll need to budget for around $14K if you want a decent quality dual-format scanner. The hardest part is adding gates to it to get the film perfectly flat, but there should be a commercial product available soon (aftermarket gates) that you can buy for the Universal MkII, but be aware they won't work with the older Moviestuff machines since they had a different design. If anyone has a Universal MkII please send me a private message, my mate who designed the gates may want to get others to test them before fully going to market with them to ensure they'll work with other machines besides his one.

The Pictor Pro is fine if you only want to do 8mm and Super 8, priced at €13.5K which is less than half the price of the HDS+.

They use a variety of machines. The Ultrasonic scanners were designed for Trike which is banned from manufacture since the 90's due to ozone depletion (it only has an atmospheric life of 6 years though unlike the CFCs). You can read about that in the Montreal Protocol 1995 assessment document. It's the best solvent though, some of the companies have switched to using Perc which is a dry cleaning chemical and highly hazardous so you need the right space to set up anything using that (as Frank mentions you need permits as well and vapour recovery). Some companies use other solvents like the 3M ones which are safer to handle but less effective cleaning solvents and much more expensive. The alcohol-based Lipsner-Smith machines are a good choice if for something safe to handle yourself if you're setting up at home or in an office, you need to re-lubricate film after cleaning though with Film Guard or your choice of lubricant as alcohol dries out the film. If you're hand-cleaning you can still get Trike in small quantities. A good ultrasonic clean gets the film much cleaner than hand-cleaning.

It's the newer generation - 4th gen/Pregius S. But from all the specs it looks like it should perform essentially the same as the 6.5K one it will depend on the camera model of course and the required cooling etc. It's about $5K retail from Emergent, or there's also one with dual-gain HDR now and that's $8K. Someone I know has experimented with the dual-gain camera in a XENA and said it brings a little bit of extra detail in the dense areas when dual-gain is enabled. Let me see... MC245CG-SY-UB-HDR (that's the USB3 version so will be slower) $7,605 and MX245CG-SY-X2G2-FL-HDR is $7,800 (PCIe version) those are the models Emergent has with the Pregius S IMX530 imager and dual-gain HDR. The Arri's are just 35/16mm so I think that probably has a lot to do with the price being less when compared to similar scanners that do more formats. I think that film has between 13-14 stops of dynamic range in it according to Kodak? Capturing the most out of the film's dynamic range and getting the full detail out of the dense areas in the film is the main benefit as I understand it for the newer machines with the modern sensors doing HDR scanning.

There's a pricing sheet here with all of Arri's products on it including Arriscan XT. It's €284.000. Some of the other info - there's many different model Arri's it changed a lot over time, that's also true of the Lasergraphics Director and the Scanstations. The HDR comparisons on the Lasergraphics site are way out of date they look like they were done about 10 years ago, the benefits to multi-flash HDR scanning will be different now to what they were then. I think the camera + lens is about $8K retail. But there's also the newer Sony Pregius S IMX530 5.3K cameras and they're a bit cheaper. You are right though, even with exactly the same camera in another machine like a XENA it seems it's difficult to match the quality and performance of the current Scanstations. Also what they charge to upgrade the older models is outrageous really, a lot of companies and archives will have spent an awful lot on their scanners and just not have it in the budget to upgrade the camera modules for what they ask.