Grenland Group‘s AsIs division purchased two Surphaser 25HS laser scanners and one Leica Geosystems HDS6000 scanner. The laser scanning service provider tells us it expanded its fleet of scanners by more than 50% to keep up with booming demand in the North Sea, the U.S. and Southeast Asia.
Why these particular models? Jason Matsumoto, president of Grenland AsIs North America, Inc., Houston, TX, says one attraction of the Surphaser is compactness – being able to check the instrument as airline luggage saves both money and time. Last week a Grenland employee flew Houston-Stavanger round trip for $700, taking the scanner with him. Shipping the instrument separately would have cost more than $1000 with insurance. Traveling with the scanner also saves customs delays – for shipped instruments, Matsumoto notes, this can range from two days to more than four weeks when something goes awry.
Grenland also likes the quality of Surphaser data. Many North Sea clients want CAD models as their primary deliverable, Matsumoto says, and processing point clouds into geometry with Cyclone goes substantially faster with the clean, high-quality data from Surphaser than with other phase-based scanners the company has evaluated. A final attraction is price.
Why the Leica HDS6000? “Our bigger customers, especially in the U.S., often prefer the Leica brand,” Matsumoto reports. “They’ve seen the Leica workflow for a long time, are attuned to it,” and value the workflow efficiencies of using a single software suite from field to office.
Grenland AsIs has offices in Stavanger, Norway, Houston, TX, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It says the new instruments will be shared among all its locations.
