| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Digital cinema |
| Founded | 1927 |
| Founder | John Logie Baird |
| Defunct | July 24, 2012 |
| Fate | Liquidation; assets and intellectual property acquired by Blackmagic Design |
Cintel was a British digital cinema company founded in 1927 by John Logie Baird and based in Ware, Hertfordshire. The early company was called Cinema Television Ltd. Cinema Television was sold to J Arthur Rank Organization renamed Rank Cintel in 1958. It specialized in the design and manufacture of professional post-production equipment, for transcribing film into video or data formats. It was formerly part of the Rank Organisation.[1] Along with a line of telecines, Rank Cintel made 3 tube RGB color video projectors in the 1960s.
Their main products were based on either cathode ray tube (CRT) Flying-spot scanner or charge-coupled device (CCD) technology and include, like the diTTo, diTTo Evolution & dataMill film scanners, Millennium II, Millennium HD & C-Reality & DSX telecines, imageMill 1 & 2 image processing system. The CRT tubes were made by Rank and Brimar. In September 2002 Cintel purchased ITK - Innovation TK Ltd. ITK held a number of patents for features used in Cintel products and also made the competitive unit the Millennium telecine. ITK founded in 1994, also made upgrade products include the TWiGi system, the SCAN’dAL, and the Y-Front.[2][3][4]
Many movies and TV shows for TV were transferred from film to TV on Cintel Telecines. Cintel saw reduced sales with the introduction of Spirit DataCine in 1996. The business was in administration until its announced liquidation. On July 24, 2012 Blackmagic Design acquired the assets of Cintel.[5]