i've made them on a Lightjet 2080, Rhino LVT and a Solitaire 16. The negs come out nice, but the chromes from these things are nicer and what they were built for. The lightjet is the best of the bunch.
The reasons these things existed was so that people could output chromes for print. This was especially important for national advertising campaigns. Ford could have one photo corrected and approved produced without variance 1000 times for 1000 publications. They were used wherever dup'ing was used. Once a scan had been made and prepped, you simply snet the file to the film recorder and walked away. The Lightjet and Solitaire were much better at this than LVT's. The solitire used maron-carrol (sp?) film modules. This meant that you could attach long roll 35mm, 70mm, 5" or 9" rolls. The lightjet worked like a laser printer on steroids. It had film cassettes that could be loaded with 4x5, 5x7, 8x10 or 11x14 film. The LVT that I used, had a drum that would take one sheet of film at a time -- generally 8x10. This made it infinitely less efficient. The LVT output may have been better than the Solitaire, not as good as the lightjet, slower and almost as labour intensive as manual dup'ing. Why the LVT survived and not the others is beyond me.
The Solitaire was used in the cine industry for just about anything involving CGI up until about 2000. None of these things were used all that often for creating neg's for printing. As far as printing goes, they were probably used more often to create printable chromes for ciba's, more than negs for c-prints.
