Another one is that nobody made a feeder for movie film, for ANY of the consumer or "prosumer" scanners at any price.
If you want film scanned today to individual files per frame, it's still a bunch of money if you can find someone to do it... and good luck getting it done right.
The movie film scanners that are top notch are easily in the six figure range, and go up depending on the features. In a past life, I was researching a scanner to buy for film restoration purposes, and I can't remember the name of the company or unit, but it would move each frame into place and then "gently" press down to flatten the film, and then triple flash it to monochrome CCD with the appropriate RGB filter. It was a big machine and with the flattening and triple flashing was not real time capable, but not as slow as I would have expected. Somewhere between 12-18fps for 2K and slowed down for 4K+ scanning. The project was never funded, so it was all for naught, but I enjoy getting to research new toys like that while on the clock so to speak.
The Northlight is definitely one of the units we looked at, and was a top contender. Ultimately, it was between the Northlight and a second vendor, but funding was pulled before we ever got to make a decision. So, no new toys for me and the team =(
I understand (I work in the industry), but the point still stands that these companies could have added greatly to the appeal of their scanners by offering a motion-picture attachment, no matter how slow.
I was considering trying to build one out of an inspection microscope, but gave it up and just had my most-important reels scanned to TIFFs.
>I was considering trying to build one out of an inspection microscope, but gave it up
justifying the cost of the people that did not give up and made an actual product. "if this shit was easy, everyone would do it!" is something i remind myself all the time
Sure. I don't begrudge the cost of the devices. In this case I'm calling out the missed opportunity of having built most of such a device already and not following through to expand its appeal to more potential customers by offering a particular accessory.
Also the opposing viewpoint to remind yourself of is that hey, SOMEBODY was the first to make one of these things and started a company to do it! I've given up on ideas before starting because of the manufacturing technology required, only to see a company like GoPro come out of nowhere and own a market segment.
Cool! Thanks for the link. I checked out a few DIY projects years ago, and even bought a few broken Super-8 projectors to scrounge their film-advance mechanisms. But I haven't revisited the state of the DIY art for a long time.
If you want film scanned today to individual files per frame, it's still a bunch of money if you can find someone to do it... and good luck getting it done right.