The cause of this is due to the fact that Christie's CA21 automation IGNORES the failsafes! Any real automation would have shut down and sounded the alarm. You can read my review of this unit by clicking here. The film piles onto the floor like this after a power surge as well, only ALL 16 of them do it simultaneously until we can manually stop them!

My point? I have been campaigning to Christie and Pennywise for several months now, and still have received no upgraded EPROM to fix the failsafe problems! It canbe fixed, but Christie and Pennywise simply do not care.

Beware if you buy ANY products from either of these companies. They do not love us. You think a big company like Christie would be able to solve something like this rather quickly. Whaddya think? Should Christie and/or Pennywise pay for a replacement reel 1 every time this happens? Should they pay for 16 replacement reels whenever we have a power surge and can't stop all of the projectors from dumping the prints quick enough? I think that would be fair.

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This is another gripe I have with Christie. They have admitted to me that 30% of the control sensor assemblies are defective. Why they send them all to my theatre is beyond me. Actually 70% of mine work just fine. Probably more than that. But they fail without notice. Either the deck spins too fast or not fast enough. The resistance cannot be maintained and the assembly must be replaced.

The older, red LEDs seem to work just fine. I don't know why Christie can't make them work correctly anymore. I have personally spoken to the tech at Christie on the phone about this problem and his diagnosis was that somebody was running around tampering with the settings. He didn't feel that Christie could churn out any defective products like that. This was 2 years ago. It's still happening. It was another Christie staffer that told me about the 30% failure statistic.

Now take a look at the picture of the Christie automation. Weird, huh?

This particular design has been around for a few years now, and from reports at some of the sites in my circuits, the Kinoton version works quite well.

Still, the two are wayyyyyyyyyy too similar in design for my liking. Looks like Pennywise got hold of a set of dummy plans, tho

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My automation here at the Rialto is very simple. But when the past cinema tech couldn't get the failsafe powered when a fuse blew, he jury-rigged it by tying it into the exciter supply. The result was that when you hit the exciter lamp, the projector would start. We replaced the fuse and unhooked his rig.

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PS. Could you fill us in on why you want automation in a changeover screening room in the first place. I have always perfered that changeover booths, screening room or not, be completly manual.

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The Kinoton platter is also connected to the projector and the projector motor will not <start> if the take-up platter control arm is not pulled across (ie: film loaded). So, in the case of a power-outage, the Kinoton motor takes so long to slow down and stop that the platter control arm ends up at the <no film> position and the projector simply WON'T start again when the power comes back on. That's my theory anyway.

Apart from this, I I will talk to one of the field engineers at the start of the week and ask him what would happen in a situation like the one mentioned. I seriously doubt, though , that Kinoton would make such a stupid mistake in the system's design. I can also say that their customer service (and that of their dealers) has been second-to-none so far.

Is it maybe possible that one designer has sold their system to both companies? On close inspection, they are too similar not to be related at all.

Anyway, the Cinemation only has 15 command lines across. Remember that 2 of those are taken away just for "projector 1 motor start" and "projector 2 motor start". Then you've got to dedicate 4 of them for sound format switching (8 if a CP-500 is used), screen lights up and down, house lights up, mid and down, possible side lighting as well up and down, flat format, scope format, douser open, douser close, possible slide or video projector on and off...basically I'm looking for whatever can handle the most variables as I'm getting tired of outgrowing systems. To date, Gary Stanley's UA barcode automation seems to be the superior system of choice (the cues on the film tells the automation what to do...no programming from show to show), but even that has it's quirks and was never intended to be used as an automation for changeover.

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