Hi Todd, yes that’s their latest improvement since late last year.
By the way you were correct that it’s back in-development. They have a new lead developer, and a friend of mine I believe has spoken to him.
The LG Archivist is now a much better scanner than the HDS+ for the money. The only exception is if you need to scan 8mm at 6.5K, however Lasergraphics have priced it aggressively. It’s not hard to jerry-rig a similar wetgate feature for the Archivist. The HDS+ can drop frames because of the way it advances the frame (using a laser), the Archivist doesn’t drop frames. HDS+ doesn’t have HDR, and doesn’t have warped film gates. The Archivist stops the scan on a failed splice automatically, tells you to fix it, and resumes scanning from the next frame.
There was going to be a 35mm Archivist as well, but it would have killed the Scanstation so it was dropped. The Archivist is basically made from Scanstation parts as it is - for example it has exactly the same 35mm rollers that are on the Scanstation, even though it doesn’t support 35mm or 28mm! But it’s priced a lot cheaper.
On the Cintel, I believe they will have to rewrite the capture software if they change resolution. They haven’t changed the camera in 4 years, but they do need to put in a better one as everyone knows. If they put in a 6.5K camera it would be fine. HDR is also an issue with it, it needs a brighter light so it can do the HDR pass at 24fps, and at the moment HDR forces a rewind followed by the HDR pass it really needs to either scan HDR in a single pass at 12fps or to do the HDR pass in reverse, again either of those options will require a lot of work with the software though so I wouldn’t hold your breath. HDR is a free feature on the Cintel so I can’t see where Blackmagic has the budget to invest in the software development to get it right. The sliding doors are also stupid, it makes the Cintel take up twice the space that it should occupy, it would be better to have hinged doors.