Products Northlight

The Northlight scanner is engineered to meet the exceptional demands of feature-length digital film mastering. Built around a non-static, optical bench of solid marble, Northlight produces ultra-quiet, high-resolution, stable scans with superb colour fidelity and repeatability. All spatial information and dynamic range is captured in a single pass.

Ideal for mastering current feature film projects, Northlight is also perfectly suited to back catalogue preservation. It can handle 16 and Super16mm, all 35mm formats, 3 perf, 4 perf, and VistaVision. Switching formats takes just a few minutes.

Installed in over 40 high-profile studios worldwide, Northlight 1 handles any output format, crop, or aspect ratio up to 6K resolution. Robust engineering ensures an exceptionally long service life, plus on-site upgrades allow all Northlight 1 users to enjoy the powerful new features of Northlight 2.

The Northlight 2 matches – and surpasses – the requirements of the feature film industry as it embraces 4K workflow and digital cinema projection. Northlight 2 delivers up to six times the scanning speed of Northlight 1, with an internal resolution of 8K.

FilmLight is guided by one overriding objective: to provide the best film-digitising system in the world. Acknowledged as an industry leader and installed in most premier studios around the globe, Northlight 1 – and now Northlight 2 – continues to fulfil that objective.

Northlight 2 — The Quality Standard

The images below demonstrate the resolving power delivered by Northlight 2. A reasonable quality 4K scan requires 83 line pairs per millimetre to be well resolved. Now look closely at the spiral of increasing line pairs and you can clearly see that the Northlight 2 is resolving more than 160 lines per millimetre.

With meaningful 8K fidelity like this, Northlight 2 ensures unsurpassable quality for its two-times oversampled 4K output.

Four years ago, the Northlight set a new quality standard in digital intermediate scanning. As the feature film industry embraces a 4K workflow in preparation for digital cinema projection, Northlight 2 is delivering not just the speed that this requires, but actually increasing its quality lead with unbeatable results.

Move your mouse over the image below for a zoomed in view.

Northlight 2 scan

To download a full-scale version of the scan (4MB), right-click here and select Save Link/Target As.