Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

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fobos8
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Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

Post by fobos8 »

Hi guys

I'm looking into getting a scanner soon. Maybe a second hand P20 or something similar.

Apart from calibration what are the ongoing costs like? Are some scanners more reliable than others? Do you need to constantly buy spares for older machines?

I have a 2015 Total station and its never is faulty, I've not bought one spare part. It gets calibrated annually.

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Re: Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

Post by landmeterbeuckx »

fobos8 wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2020 7:08 pm Hi guys

I'm looking into getting a scanner soon. Maybe a second hand P20 or something similar.

Apart from calibration what are the ongoing costs like? Are some scanners more reliable than others? Do you need to constantly buy spares for older machines?
I've never bought a spare part for any instrument. It gets calibrated though.

What you should consider is the maintenance on the software, this is quite a bit if you want to keep updated. Don't know the cost of Leica software but it isn't cheap.
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fobos8
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Re: Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

Post by fobos8 »

Lieven - what scanners do you have? and what age are they?

Cheers, Andrew
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Re: Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

Post by fobos8 »

if others could give feedback on ongoing maintenance/fault repair costs it would be much appreciated.

I need to know what I'm getting myself into.
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Re: Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

Post by landmeterbeuckx »

fobos8 wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2020 7:16 pm Lieven - what scanners do you have? and what age are they?

Cheers, Andrew
i have an older trimble tx5 and a riegl vz400i
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Re: Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

Post by Ioannis »

fobos8 wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2020 7:31 am if others could give feedback on ongoing maintenance/fault repair costs it would be much appreciated.

I need to know what I'm getting myself into.
I you choose leica beware of CCP packages every year, and you must pay for every part of the software that you buy. For example you buy cyclone you must pay extra for publish your pointcloud extra for publishing faster extra to share it to web with clients extra for moddeling $$$.
Now i am Leica user but if i could change it for sure i would choose another brand due to the maintenance costs..
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Re: Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

Post by Jamesrye »

Our Leica C10 is a workhorse, we've had it for ten years or so and its worked in some very tough environments. It's tough and reliable and still a good tool. Whilst the P40 is faster and better, we still use the C10 on occasion.

As others have said, the biggest ongoing cost is the CCP. As a minimum, you'll need a REGISTER license. The other modules don't seem to get updated that often any more - and it's amazing what you can do with free and low cost software like CLOUD COMPARE, RHINO 3D etc...
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Re: Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

Post by fobos8 »

Thanks guys. I take your point about about the software.

So apart from an annual calibration the hardware costs of negligible even on older scanners?
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Re: Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

Post by TByers »

I can speak a little bit to repair costs. We have many different scanners but I prefer to use the FARO X330 (weird, I know). Anyways, I dropped the scanner from roughly 1 foot high while it was in a protective backpack and the screen broke. It's going to cost us around $20k to get it re-calibrated and fixed. On top of that, it takes forever for it to get calibrated and fixed and sent back. I'm not entirely sure why that is.

In closing, keep in mind that they are VERY fragile, and expensive to fix. We've also had to replace one of our tripods which cost quite a bit as well. I don't know the exact figure but it was in the low thousands.
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Re: Owning a scanner - ongoing costs?

Post by sim.herrod »

fobos8 wrote: Thu Jan 16, 2020 12:11 pm Thanks guys. I take your point about about the software.

So apart from an annual calibration the hardware costs of negligible even on older scanners?
We've got 2 Leica HDS6000's and for the first time in 9ish years, one of them has just been sent for repair. Unfortunately, it's highly probable that it won't be worth repairing, but it's paid for itself in that time.

As already mentioned Leica CCPs are an annual heartbreaker.
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