In my opinion (and others may disagree), there are only two worthwhile platters
on the market. The Christie AW3 and the Strong Alpha phase control. The
Christie is a good platter, but in order to get it to work even acceptably, you must
be willing to tweak the hell out of it. They are extremely finicky and if you are even
a hair off (or less) on the settings, it won't perform as it should. You must also
take apart the platter and re-adjust the springs to get it to work worth a damn.
Out of the box, though, they are useless.

Two points, one is Joe is right...straight out of the shipping box these things are
useless. You will not find any good support for these machines from anyone at
Christie. The last theater I opened had a Christie rep and he personally set them
up...they were slinging prints all over the place!

Second, I understand Christie is now starting to make a different type of payout
control on their latest version of platters. This I do not understand. Why fix
perfection? I have faith it will not be as good. Thus, I am not sure if I will
recommend any of the "new" AW3 units until I have had a chance to work with
them.

As to Strongs, I hate them. They are the only platter that must be within about 5
feet of the projector or the weight of the film itself will cause the feed to over-feed
and drag the film onto the floor during operation! What crap. I also don't like the
extra small rollers. Too much tension. And their elevator...why not make it a little
taller so it doesn't slam to the top throwing all the rollers out of alignment? Check
out their center ring. Could they possibly make it any smaller? The startup speed
is way too fast because of this. And finally, there is no provision for adjusting the
final takeup roller onto the platter. As they come from the factory they are TOO
CLOSE and about half of them put those annoying platter scratches on film. This
is a really bad design, which in all fairness "could" be made to be a decent design.

SPECO platters are my second choice a far as proper handling of film. They are
not without their own problems, though. First, the new removable brain is a great
idea, but what a pain to thread! Also there is too little tension on payout with the
removables. Their center rings are easily bent during print moving. They really
must work on that. The later elevator takeup design (with 3 rollers on top instead
of two) was my idea to a fellow at Cinemark, and he took the credit for it.
Unfortunately, he did not explain the EXACT modification to SPECO when he
took my idea. Their execution of the modifications was lousy. Now the new
rollers like to "sing" like a tuning fork during the show and it is more difficult to
thread around them since all three are now side by side. The SPECOS also have
the fan blades under the platter like Joe mentioned, so beware of breaking down
on any but the bottom platter while running a show.

Christie AW-3 is king in my book. A lot of people tell me that the Potts Alphas are junk but I like them pretty well. (Better than the SPECOs by a mile!)

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I like the arm under the platter for the rewind platter better than the yo-yo design however, but they both work. The arm design seems to rewind a tighter print, and I like that.

The only thing that really bothers me with any of the platter systems are their MUT's. I absolutely HATE the SPECO table, and I really dislike the Chritie MUT. The best MUT design would go to Strong in my book. The tension spring is a great feature. I don't like MUT's that mount the reels on the side. I find it easier to use a MUT that mounts reel on its top. And frankly the Christie MUT is slower than molases in January (not every location has platter reels). You can go platter a print or tear it down a lot faster than the Christie goes and still not damage the film.

I have experience with SPECO, Strong (older and newer), Christie and Neumade (XeTron) platter systems. There are advantages and disadvantages to each system.

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