The following is from a post on the 3DScanning Reddit forum. I have not verified the claims, but it sounds reasonable to me. Of importance is the ability to buy the fluid form and use your own air sprayer to drastically reduce the cost of spraying.
I’ve used the AESub Blue and Orange and didn’t care for them. There’s another company which makes these sprays, called MR Chemie, which AESub originally split out of. I’ve used every sublimating scanning spray that MR Chemie makes.
MR Chemie has a spray marketed as the REFLECON TARNISH 50, which uses cyclododecane (a paraffin-like waxy solid) as its sublimating agent. In my experience it sprays much smoother and deposits a finer layer (preserving detail better) than the formulations based on whatever AESub is, and it can last a very long time.
Sublimating sprays will always disappear off of outer corners of parts first. We pretty typically have the TARNISH 50 take upwards of 45 minutes to start noticing corners thinning even under moving air (though we scan aerospace parts so we are typically scanning in a controlled, 20C environment). Flat surfaces can take 2-3 hours to disappear. When we want to clean a part off, we’ll put it in an environmental chamber with a blower at 35C to 40C and it can still take thirty or forty minutes to get clean.
Price-wise the stuff is similar, but if you can spray out of a HVLP or an airbrush you can buy it in liquid form 1L at a time instead of aerosol cans and it’s effectively 5-10x cheaper than the AESub.
The stuff is approved for use on metal, composite, and certain surface coatings for flight hardware by more than one of the big three US jet engine makers, so we spray components, scan them, and ship them back letting them self-clean in transit. They studied the material and determined it to have no corrosive effect on their materials, but YYMV.
Full disclosure: if you’re in the US, my company is the reseller for the REFLECON products. We’re not a sales company, we’re an engineering and metrology company that works mostly in aerospace propulsion. We became the US distributer primarily because we use so much of the stuff that it was the easiest way for us to buy it.
Edit: Every sublimating spray I’ve ever used smells bad.