The cavalry has arrived - Editor's Note - Cintel acquires ITK

Post, Oct, 2002 by Randi Altman

In this space a couple of months ago, we hinted at the impending purchase of telecine-maker ITK's assets, in September; UK-based Cintel made it official. Not much of a surprise considering that at one time, ITK founder Stuart Hunt was an integral part of the Cintel engineering team and that both Cintel and ITK telecines are CRT based.

While Y-Front, Twigi and Scan'dal were created to work with Cintel gear, the Millennium and Millennium Lite were head-on competitors to Cintel's telecine offerings. So how is this going to work, now that all of the gear lives under one roof?

"Well, it's kind of early days right now," says Cintel's managing director; Adam Welsh. "Firstly, our intentions are to support the existing 27 Millennium and Millennium Lite machines in the marketplace and to continue to develop those products." The company also intends to support and sell ITK's Ursa add-ons Twigi, Scan'dal and Y-Front.

"As to Millennium's positioning with regard to our existing products," he says "it's too early. We have to do a lot more research in the marketplace, but in no way will Millennium or ITK products replace current Cintel products."

Industry wide, 2002 has been a tough year economically. So, how many of these high-priced systems does Cintel think it will sell in 2003?

Welsh explains that "over the past 10 years, the average number of telecines sold in any year has been something like 54-55 machines among a number of different manufacturers. We came into this year thinking it was going to be difficult and had a business plan for just 12 machines -- we've so far managed to sell 13 to date."

Welsh explains that the overall number of new telecine machines sold in 2002 is way down. "It's down to 20-25 machines at this point," he reports. "So what do I think next year? We are looking at something like 15-16 machines next year." He says that will be a mix of Millennium, DSX and C-Reality.

Next year should be interesting due to Cintel's expanding product range. In addition to the ITK gear, they have OSCAR, a realtime dirt and scratch concealment system that works optically (13 have been sold so far). And at BC last month they introduced Grace, a realtime upstream grain reduction system that works in all resolutions and all film types. Grace will be available at NAB next year as an update to C-Reality and DSX.

So looking back at the ITK purchase and looking ahead, Welsh says, "The number of machines being sold in the worldwide market is not enough to support that many telecine manufacturers, and particularly not two in one field -- CRT-based telecines, Let's hope that our proposition is strong and our support and development are strong going forward."