The companies currently making “professional” 8mm scanners are: Filmfabriek, LaserGraphics, MWA Nova, Digital Cinema Systems, Kinetta, DFT, Korn Manufaktur, and Blackmagic. Your best options are to talk to Filmfabriek and LaserGraphics. If you don’t need 16mm then yes a Pictor is the entry point that will rival the work of the much more expensive professional machines, and it also has a nice short film path that is better suited for 8mm compared with the 35mm machines. In saying that, in a full service film lab they typically run traditional huge 35mm film cleaners, and if they’re doing that they’ll build 8mm up onto 2,000ft reels anyway because that’s the capacity for those cleaners, whereas for you the film cleaner of choice would be a media-pad cleaner like the Film-O-Clean (Isopar-G is the best solvent) and loading up to 400ft reels.
What Filmfabriek charge is very reasonable - to put their price into perspective, a professional software restoration suite like you buy from Algosoft will run you about €20K, and they don’t charge a service/support contract either like most other companies do. I don’t have the latest pricing on the LaserGraphics Archivist, but it would be more like €60K excluding VAT and the support contract. It is a big investment and very expensive for an individual setting up, plus don’t forget that you will need to budget to build the host computer to their specifications as well. As you say though, you can offer work on it - you can set yourself up to offer inexpensive home movie scanning with it pretty much right away and you’ll beat the pants off most of the people doing that work. Then you can save up for a restoration suite if you want, etc.
Ventura Images is a low-end scanner, and for €10K it is very expensive to spend for what you get. For what they’re charging, honestly you’d be better off looking at Film-Digital. The camera in the Ventura Images scanner is xiQ so the 2K camera is CMOSIS:
That camera is not suited for scanning. Neither the 1.3 MP models nor the 2K models, even MovieStuff had a higher spec camera than that one. Changing the camera for a better one would revert it back to being a DIY scanner as their capture software would only support the hardware as it comes to you. There’s lots of other parts that are under-the-hood so to speak as well, and that also affects the quality of what you get. The track that the camera is mounted on looks decent. Given the number of controls on the front of the machine, I’d say the capture software it comes with will be extremely bare-bones/basic.
I’d have to see examples of the work off one to know more about the limitations of its light, optics and gate design. With 8mm you will have a lot of really dense film that’s harder to capture well when compared with the average stuff that post-production houses traditionally scanned. The quality of the backlight makes a huge difference, given the cameras they’re using I do not think they’ve built a light that comes close to the quality of the one that Filmfabriek uses (their one is custom-built it’s not a retail LED mounted on a heat-sink).
I hope that helps!
