Digital cinema premieres in New York, Los Angeles

17 Jun 2002

By Phillip Hill

George Lucas's blockbuster "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" will be the vehiclefor the world's first digital projection in four US cinemas on Friday, June 18.

After the hype of the film comes the hype of digital cinema billed as thebreakthrough to replace film technology which is now a century old.

Two competing technologies will be demonstrated for the first time to a payingpublic, each technology running in two cinemas, one each in New York and one eachin Los Angeles.

A month earlier, delegates to the Society for Information Display symposium inSan Jose, California, were treated to the first demonstration of both systemsback to back (but not to the new Star Wars film).

Performance of digital projectors in terms of light output, dynamic range andcontrast ratio has greatly improved in recent years and the two companiesHughes-JVC Technology Corp. and Texas Instruments were demonstrating their latestgeneration equipment.

Market research company Stanford Resources says that even if performance isclose, it is still not completely acceptable to the film industry and that ashift to electronic cinema may be several years away.

Although electronic cinema will reduce distribution costs, it will be verydifficult to match the price/performance level of the standard film projector.The entire distribution chain of the movie industry will have to be redesigned tomake electronic cinema a reality.

Texas Instruments' system is called Digital Light Processing (DLP). The companysays that its latest prototype will project up to 20,000 lumens with a contrastratio of 800:1 ontop a 50 foot screen. Texas says it can increase the contrastratio to 1000 in the laboratory and this will be incorporated into the next(fourth) generation DLP.

Hughes-JVC uses ILA technology which accepts a low-intensity light image andconverts it in real time into a high brightness image using light from a xenonarc lamp. Output is currently 17,000 lumens but the company says more than 20,000lumens is not far off.