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Transfer Company = New Lasergraphics "Director 10K"?


Scott Pickering

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On 9/23/2019 at 10:17 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Perry, why would Scanstation release a subpar sensor like that? You should not have to do all that work to make it doable. With all the money they charge it should produce excellent results right out of the box.

Was it worth it for you to move up from 4K just so you could say you have 5K, but everything had to be reworked to make it acceptable?

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.

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I think I acknowledged that you will capture more information as you say. I'm just saying especially if you finish in HD, a 4k scan may only be a 25% improvement in perceived quality when footage is shot soft or poorly exposed. Aren't we basically agreeing with each other? I don't think your point is lost. I'm sure you have many people extremely happy with your 4k services, you do great work. 

Looks like 4k scans have come down significantly in price which is great. In fact Pro8mm lists their fees and a 4k scan is actually 25% more than a 2k scan which is kind of funny after I pulled that 25% number out of the air.

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I think we are agreeing mostly, yes. I just think that the focus shouldn't be on how much more picture quality you're squeezing out of the image. Past a certain point, you're not. But what's super important is to not paint yourself into a corner with a lower resolution scan, when display tech is constantly going to higher resolutions. Like it or not (and I mostly don't like it because 4k in a home setting is more than enough unless you've got an absolutely massive screen you're sitting too close to), more pixel density is coming. 

As for the pricing - our 2k and 4k HDR scans are about half of what Pro8mm charges (no idea if the pricing on their site is for 2-flash HDR, because they don't specify). Very high res scanning has been affordable for some time, if one looks around. Part of the calculus for not doing high res scans is that traditionally it was *very* expensive. And some places stick to that old model of charging high prices for high res. To a point that makes sense because it's more work to deal with and it goes slower than lower res scanning. But it's also not reflective of the actual costs of doing this kind of work, in 2019...

Edited by Perry Paolantonio
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34 minutes ago, Scott Pickering said:

The one place in the USA that has the Director 10k is charging $4 a foot for 16mm 10k scans with HDR for DPX files. That's 400 bucks for a 100 foot reel. That's way too high in price.

That is expensive. But remember that the scanner at 10k HDR runs at 1fps, assuming no IR flash. So the scan time alone, not including setup is over an hour, for just 100 feet. Then there's the media management. those 10k DPX files will be about 4x larger than your 5k scans were, so everything runs incredibly slowly, from capture to copy - just moving those files onto an external drive probably takes another hour or two, and all of that is time the scanner isn't working. This is a case where I think the price is justified, if a bit steep. 

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3 hours ago, Scott Pickering said:

The one place in the USA that has the Director 10k is charging $4 a foot for 16mm 10k scans with HDR for DPX files. That's 400 bucks for a 100 foot reel. That's way too high in price.

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.

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