- Leica has announced the ScanStation C10 and Cyclone 7.
- It is interesting to see the direction that this new technology seems to be emphasizing.
- Surveyors will be more comfortable with some of the new features, but can they afford them.
I sat in on a Leica webinar yesterday that featured the new ScanStation C10 scanner and news that Cyclone has been upgraded to version 7. Some of the new features highlighted for the C10 were its ability to rapidly scan an overhead dome area, total-station like interface, and integrated real time streaming video.
It had seemed to me that things had been rather quiet lately so it is interesting to see what Leica has been developing, and what they consider to be their strategic product direction. From this release it seems that improving the use of the scanner as a total station is a top priority. This would seem to support the idea that the average surveyor, who is comfortable with their total station, is a target market for this scanner. Other features such as an optical plummet, which facilitates setting the scanner up over a traverse point would tend to support this.
On the software side Cyclone 7 has a new Traverse editor and features a complete re-write of the database structure to support high speed import of both phase based and C10 data. It is not clear whether there is backward compatibility with earlier versions of Cyclone, given the changes to the database.
Surveyors are certain to be impressed with the new “total station” like functionality. The question is can they afford it. This is where the real work needs to be done.
