Lemoine vs Sharnoa controller

[metalcaster4jc]

I currently have a sharnoa tiger 3 mill with the sdc 741 controller. I'm looking to upgrade the mill as economically as possible and have considered the centroid controller ($$$$$$$),or using mach3 and replacing drives and whatever else is necessary or I might have an opportunity to purchase a used lemoine controller with digitizer. My "cnc guy" who has tons of expereince serviceing both types of controlls tells me it is little more than a plug in exchange with much more capability. I don't know much about controllers, I'm a foundry guy, but want to get more information before I commit the $$ and end up hardly any better than I am now.

Has anyone used the lemoine? How about with the digitizer?

Ideally I would like to be able to reverse engineer castings that customers bring to me and want to have duplicated. I'd like to digitized the existing casting and then scale the output to allow for shrinkage and then use it to cut a new pattern for the part.
Some folks I've talked to about digitizers have been disappointed in the performance and was the reason I was considering the centroid as the demo cd video was impressive.