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Irish Cinema Set to Go Digital First
LocalisationDude writes "The BBC is reporting that Ireland will be the first country in the world to have their traditional 35mm film projectors replaced with digital projectors. An American company is installing digital projectors in 500 cinemas to replace the traditional film projectors. Cinemas using the technology will be able to download the latest releases to a computer server via satellite at a lower cost."
Granted not in all movie theaters, but the mayor cinema group has been showing digital movies for more than a year now.
Check out the 'Hoe werkt digital cinema..' link on the following page:
http://www.kinepolis.be/index.cfm?PageID=2043
See this Slashdot story.
"The average person can't tell the difference between 35mm and digital projection."
You, my good sir, are wrong. Have you ever been to a movie that have been shown for several weeks? You may notice an ocasional 'pop' or scratch in the film, which is due to wear. The average movie goer does notice that. However, with digital there is no physical film to degrade. Thus, every time the movie is played in its original, blemish free form.
The average person can't tell the difference between 35mm and digital projection.
You certainly can! For starters, the image doesn't have any scratches or floaters on it. It also doesn't jitter around or flicker like film. Oh, and the colors tend to be considerably brighter. The downside is that when the screen goes totally black, it's actually a very dark grey (more of an illuminated black).
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Avica . . . .
An American company, Avica, is installing digital projectors in cinemas to replace the traditional 35mm film projectors.
http://www.itv.com/news/world_262393.html
That's the MPAA!! Get your tyrancial companys right!
It's horizontal. 4k is 4k x 2k pixels. However, the 'smaller' digital cinema projectors use relsolutions as low as 1280x1024 with anamorpic lenses to stretch the whole image over the 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 screen.
Over here in europe, even that is much better than the average copy of conventional film, since the focus is adjusted just once and stays essentially perfect, and you can't scratch a digital movie, or neglect to service the projector so bad that the image is vibrating as if the projector was run by a two stroke engine.
My local theater got Digital Projectors for Episode 2 and has stayed digital ever since. Wouldn't that make Ireland NOT the first country?
But anyway, I got there late and had to sit very close to the screeen and... I could see pixels! I could only see them on things with a lot of contrast, like subtitles, but they were hard to ignore from where I was. Subsequent visits to the theater, sitting at a reasonable distance from the screen, they were not noticable.
Actually, we are third last in the EU25 for broadband access according to the most recent EU survey (by this stage we are probably last!).
Only 70% or so of lines connected to a broadband-enabled exchange are suitably good quality (i.e. not faulty/broken) to allow a connection. The enabled exchanges only cover the cities and major towns. So contrary to Eircon's outright *lies* to the people and government (they've pretty much successfully brainwashed people that only techies are aware there's a problem) there is a pitiful amount of broadband coverage.
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Note: although there are only 24 physical frames every sec, the shutter actually runs at twice this speed (i.e. each frame is displayed twice), so the shutter speed is 48fps. A shutter speed of only 24 fps, projecting on such a large arc of vision would look terrible!
" To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. "
That is not specific to digital cinema, and there is no reason why 35mm cannot meet or beat anything any other system comes up with. DTS has succcessfully separated the sound and picture in 35mm (as well as 16mm and 70mm) presentations. Their latest processor, the XD10, has support for 10 channels.
-No Flickering (the shutter runs at 24fps which is low enough to notice)
There aren't many, if any, theaters running single bladed shutters. A double-bladed shutter giving a refresh rate 48Hz is the norm. And, depending on what kind of shutter you have, the shutter is usually open a larger percentage of the time than it is closed, reducing flicker. If you really want, you can always get a triple-bladed shutter for a nice 72Hz refresh rate, but then you have to watch your light output.
if you look real hard at some text on screen you can actually see pixels.. but considering how much sharper the image is, who cares
I do. I don't go to the theater to look at visible pixels. I can get that at home. Fortunately, 4K resolution (which is enough to make the pixels invisbly small at normal viewing distance) seems to be the direction things are headed these days. Sony was demoing 4K equipment at ShoWest this year. And with digital intermediates starting to be done at 4K the source material is there.
The biggest area where video projection still falls behind film is dynamic range. Side-by-side comparsions make this abundantly clear. While projector manufacturers are sturggling to eek out a little bit more on their contrast ratios, print stocks like Kodak's 2393 (aka "Vision Premiere", used most recently for prints of "The Incredibles") can deliver 10,000:1 contrast. Yes, really. The max density is so high it's not just dark grey, it's really, truly, black. Video systems have a lot of work cut out to catch up to that.
Free Hans!