Evans

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By the way, 750000 mirrors (assuming 1 per pixel) is not even quite enough to get 1024 by 768 resolution, assuming all must be used at once for an entire image. I thought the current resolution being considered for digital projection was 1280 by 1024, which would require 1310720 mirrors (or pixels).

There is more than just the financial woes.
Since I have one of these at my theatre, here is what I feel.

Distribution is fairly good, We get the movie on DVD and have to feed the QuBit player. The DVD player is only 6X but it planned on being upgraded. It took about 4-5 hours total time to feed the disks (16 total, 5 reels with 3 disks each and then a trailer disk) Now, this still requires Disney or TI to set up the playlist but this is being worked on.

Average consumer is accepting of the image quality. Just don't sit up on the screen, stay back at least one screen height. You don't sit on top of your TV do you?

Yes, TI is actively working on a bunch of issues to refine the product. It will be awhile before it becomes more common place.

Paul.

At my theatre we are using a couple of projectors that were designed in 1944. Apart from being upgraded to red LED and dolby digital they are pretty much the same as they were 56 years ago.

What is the chances of your expensive DLP machine being able to project a digital image in 56 years time using whatever the source of the day will be ? What is the chance of it being able to accept stuff in 5 years time ?

With the speed that computers and technology are evolving I can see that theatres will need to upgrade their projectors every couple of years to keep pace and this could become costly.

Just my thoughts

Paul

I agree about the need to upgrade after a few years and technology changes being a major possible problem with digital projection.

I have been in the field of computer science since 1984 and in just 16 years, have seen tremendous changes in technology. Unfortunately, computer equipment for long-term use has major problems that need to be thought out.

1. Equipment reliability: CPUs, memory, boards, and hard-drives are quite reliable, but the new "digital projectors" haven't had time to be tested to determine their useful life, MTBF, and nature of performance degradation with equipment age. Current film projectors have proven themselves for many years and maintenance costs can be reasonably estimated.

2. Equipment becoming obsolete due to better technology becoming available: Even if equipment does not wear out, people may stop watching movies in theatres with older lower-resolution equipment with poorer image quality if newer technology becomes available that surpasses it. A good analogy is my 200 MHz computer at home that I bought back in 1996. It performs just as well as it did when I bought it when it was the fastest thing available, but my 933 MHz machine in my office makes me perceive the 200 MHz as slower than it used to be, even though it isn't. Computer technology tends to be very expensive at the start, then the price drops drastically as better equipment becomes available, with the new equipment being available at the same price as the original (now inferior) equipment was. Theatres investing in the first line of digital projection equipment will likely get burned by this.

3. Equipment becoming obsolete due to higher demands being placed on it. A digital projector and supporting processing equipment and network connectivity may be sufficient for the current movies, but if resolution increases in the future, more disk storage and higher network bandwidth may require upgrades or new equipment, even if scaled to the older lower resolution to be projected. Analogy: A 386/33 ran MS-DOS programs wonderfully, but Windows 95 slowed it to a crawl and made it nearly unusable.

4. Equipment becoming obsolete due to changing standards. Even if the equipment is capable of functioning properly, the specific hardware in the equipment may become unsupported for a wide variety of reasons. Analogy: In our lab, our older Silicon Graphics workstations are still fast enough to be useful, but they won't run the latest versions of IRIX (SGI's UNIX), so we're limited in what we can run on those.

5. Competing equipment and/or standards. Suppose several companies have totally different projection technology. That would probably cause better quality projectors to be developed, but buying any specific brand would be risky because the eventual "winning format" may be difficult to predict. Once there is a "winner", the other technologies may become unsupported in a short period of time. You can't assume that the highest quality product (or even that either product) will always win out. Analogies: VHS vs. Beta (videotape, late 70s and early 80s), IBM PC vs. Macintosh (platform, a few years back), Windows vs. OS/2 (operating system, 1987-1990), 5.25 vs. 3.5 inch floppies (1980s), DAT vs. DCC (early 90s).

35mm film has been around a very long time and projectors can be kept running for decades. If the theatre companies can't even afford to maintain the equipment they have now, how in the world will they ever survive with the much more volatile computer-based projection equipment? I say this as a computer scientist.

There are other concerns I have about digital technology for movies. Uniform sampling of anything (like a movie scene) introduces aliasing. Due to the nature of film grains, temporal aliasing is the only objectionable aliasing that occurs when shooting with film. With digital "filming", spatial aliasing is also introduced, but that's another topic.

Evans

Since I have one of these machines at my theatre, I am trying to provide insightful, useful, and as factual as I can, information.

Will a theatre ever be 100% DLP? NO, not until ALL film companies distribute this way.

Three reasons.

(1) By distributing films in digital format, the distributors will save millions of dollars, because they won't have to pay to have 35mm prints made, just handfuls of DVDs. They are very, very financially motivated to get digital projection into theatres, and they may well do the math and realize that they can put these projectors in theatres for free and still come out ahead by not having to pay for raw filmstock, lab processing, film storage, inventory warehousing, "quality inspection", broken reels, lost & stolen films, and film disposal costs.

(2) Theatres can't afford digital projectors, and won't buy them, because they correctly realize that the first generation of digital projectors will quickly become obsolete.

(3) Studios will demand that digital projectors be equipped with extensive anti-piracy features. A digital projector isn't just a digital projector, it's also a digital setbox and a digital vault safeguarding the movie. If a digital projector is a commodity item, bought and sold by theatres and on the used market, then it is very likely that someone will be able to "tap into" a digital projector, and extract a many-times-better-than-DVD quality digital copy of current release prints, which poses an enormous piracy issue.

By having the projectors owned and maintained by the distributors:

(1) Theatres don't have to finance the installation, and regular upgrade of their digital projectors -- which they can't afford to do anyhow.

(2) The distributors can maintain both contractual and physical security over the projectors -- installing tamper-proofing devices, for instance -- thus better safeguarding the valuable digital data contained in the projectors, a selling point from the distributors to the studios.

(3) The distributors can maintain control over distribution. They keep their monopoly. If theatres own, maintain, and operate their own projectors, then the barrier to entry in the film distribution business drops to near zero, and the entire industry is up for grabs, like the music distribution industry has been thrown into chaos with the development of MP3.

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