Hi Bob, that paper was limited from the start as mentioned elsewhere. It’s a cool paper, but incredibly misleading if you’re taking it at face-value. My understanding is that both the Arri and the Director they used were out of date models run in archives. Some of the other machines may have been out of date as well. For the Kinetta they got the samples directly from the company so the latest model with the latest technology. They didn’t include the Scanstation or the HDS+ either.
That paper was published in 2018. LG moved to Sony sensors in 2019, so did Kinetta. Arri as already discussed developed a new sensor. Many older scanners are CCD and DPX-only, most don’t scan prints/dense film well, but there are many still in regular use today for production (blurary, streaming, DCP, etc). The Arriscan was released in 2004, the Director not long after, the vast majority of the machines out in the wild will be old out of date models. Arri & LG have invested in continuous development of their machines, pumping out improvements regularly. So of course if you compare an unknown model Arri to a current Kinetta you’re not getting a balanced comparison.
The Kinetta is a good scanner, but it has its limitations and one of them is that it can’t do continuous-motion HDR. Jeff himself has criticised that design, however LG has perfected it and it works well. If you compare a 6.5K Scanstation using HDR against the Kinetta with the same Sony imager you should find the Scanstation can produce a better scan. Comparing single-flash scanning however they should be equal, or near-equal. The Director with a CCD camera or a Sony imager in it should be better as it captures discreet R/G/B using a mono-sensor.