Dan Baxter

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.