A HAPPY BIRTHDAY to DIGITAL CINEMA

[Martin Brooks]

I remember being shocked that the first DLP presentations were in New Jersey and not at a venue like the Ziegfeld or the Loews Astor Plaza in Manhattan, but maybe they thought those auditoriums were too large and the image would not be bright enough.

[Marcel Birgelen]

DILA is amazing but is still an LCOS panel (as Sony's SXRD is), I'd wonder how well they would have worked with the high brightness required for larger screens.

Well, this isn't D-ILA, LCOS or SXRD just yet... actually, it's not even digital projection. It took me a while to find the document, but it was this ILA setup that actually was more like a CRT projector on steroids, using CRTs as the imager for something like an "analog LCOS LCD layer", instead of a high-resolution digitally-controlled LCD-matrix display. They indeed created a 3-color "light-valve" or rather "LCD-based image amplifier".

Here's the document describing how it works. As you can see, the thing didn't even have digital inputs yet, it took an analog RGB signal, like all those CRT projectors from that same time-period.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I've always thought it would be interesting to have a drum with about 1,000 mirrors on it, each tilted slightly differently. A laser (or several) would point at the drum. As the drum rotates, the reflected beam would scan horizontally, then jump to the next mirror causing the scanning of a line down a bit. This would create a raster with the image created by the laser being modulated.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I've always thought it would be interesting to have a drum with about 1,000 mirrors on it, each tilted slightly differently. A laser (or several) would point at the drum. As the drum rotates, the reflected beam would scan horizontally, then jump to the next mirror causing the scanning of a line down a bit. This would create a raster with the image created by the laser being modulated.

Interesting concept for a laster scanning projector, but how would this improve upon MEMS based deflection?

I still own a Sony pocket projector that's based on this Laser Scanning technique. The image looks interesting, especially since you don't really need to focus the image. It can easily be projected on e.g. curved surfaces without really losing any focus.

[Marco Giustini]

A CRT! WOW!

I know DILA has a mirror inside, I had no idea that ILA used CRTs! 132mm diagonal raster!

[Carsten Kurz]

There's a nice article about these early digital projection tests in the 6/19 (20th anniversary of digital cinema) edition of Cinema Technology Magazine, especially about the competition aspects of it: ctmag_dchistory.pdf


1999 Hughes.jpg
1999 TI.jpg


Cinepedia also has some technical details:

https://cinepedia.com/history/an-ear...igital-cinema/

[Jim Cassedy]

I've always thought it would be interesting to have a drum
with about 1,000 mirrors on it, each tilted slightly differently. A laser (or several) would point a
t the drum. As the drum rotates, the reflected beam would scan horizontally, then jump to the
next mirror causing the scanning of a line down a bit. This would create a raster with the image
created by the laser being modulated.

Well, as you might know, this 'mirror trick' was done in several mechanical television systems
in the 1920's & 30's. Some systems had two mirror drums,one for horizontal scanning, and
one for vertical displacement. The most interesting of these was the "mirror screw" which,
through its' design was able to do both.
A Mirror Screw [ internet photo]
MirrorScrew.jpg
One of the most interesting systems I've read about is the SCOPHONY TV system.
Everything I've read about them makes it sound like it was one of the better mechanical
TV systems at the time. They even had several models of large screen TV projectors,
and exhibited them, as well as several home receivers, at several technical trade
shows in the late1930's. I'm not sure exactly what caused Scophony's demise, other
than that no matter how good it was, it was still 'mechanical scanning television' and
thus was ultimately constrained by the same engineering limitations of all mechanical
systems, and also the fact that Scophony was just beginning to find it's niche right on
the eve of WWII, which pretty much stopped a lot of much research & manufacturing
due to war priorities. Scophony was located in the UK and gave several apparently
successful demonstrations of live TV broadcasts at theaters in London, just before WWII

A Scophony™️ Large Screen TV Projector For Theaters
ScophonyProj.jpg

A More "Compact Model" For Smaller Theaters
ScophonyProj-2.jpg

There's awholebuncha tech info & pix online if you search "SCOPHONY TV"

[Harold Hallikainen]

Thanks! I had not heard of SCOPHONY TV. Most mechanical television I had heard of used the spinning disk with holes to produce scanning. Their light modulator is interesting. I remember seeing a TV program on the BBC first 50 years of television. There was quite a bit about the Baird mechanical scanning system. One scene I remember was a studio with black walls and banks of photocells where the lights would be in a current TV studio. Instead of a camera, there was a light source behind the spinning disk creating the flying spot scanning the scene.

The Scophony light modulator used a piezoelectric transducer. One of those could also be used to drive a mirror to provide scanning. It would be a single mirror (or two on two transducers for X and Y scanning) as compared to the large number of mirrors on a DLP device.

Interesting ideas! I suspect the future is emissive displays with nothing mechanical (not even MEMS DLP).

[Jim Cassedy]

<edited>
The Scophony light modulator used a piezoelectric transducer.

The Scophony's light modulator, known as a "Jeferee Cell" was also experementally
used as a light modulator for optical sound recording- - but it didn't work out well for
that application.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

Well, Hughes Technology had their ILA system too, which it appears that JVC ended up with. This article describes how the technology works, and it can display an incredible contrast ratio range as well as 8k resolution... But we ended up with DLP, and Sony's baloney instead...

A certain high profile filmmaker/director had one of those JVC DILAs in his personal screening room which my colleague at the time and I serviced. The machine was big, very heavy, noisy and power hungry, but it put out a very nice image.

I still firmly believe that exhibition still took a major step backwards going to what is a hyped - up giant TV instead of film....especially now that you can get affordable giant 4k flatscreens for your home for less than you'd spend on a season's worth of actual cinema moviegoing.

I recently watched the Blu Ray of "Hateful 8" and it was awesome..but that film would have been worth a trip to a 70mm roadshow presentation.

[Marco Giustini]

I loved film and I hope I "did it right" over the years but do we all remember the quality of the (brand new) prints we used to get? And do we all remember the state of those prints after the average cinema handled them for just a few days?

Do you think this could be handled better in 2024?

[Marcel Birgelen]

A certain high profile filmmaker/director had one of those JVC DILAs in his personal screening room which my colleague at the time and I serviced. The machine was big, very heavy, noisy and power hungry, but it put out a very nice image.

Since the source of the image were three CRTs, the image would've looked much more film-like than 3DLP or 3LCD, due to the absence of a pixel grid.

Before I had access to a professional screening room, my home cinema setup featured a huge Barco Reality 1209 projector. I loved that picture so much, I built a movable hush box on wheels for it, that I could install in the front of our screening room. There is something to those perfect blacks and those colors that just feel warmer than anything DLP produces... The first row of seats is removable to allow for a mixing console to be installed, so I removed the middle seat and put the hush box right there. I still preferred that picture over our colorist-calibrated Barco DP4K-23B with high contrast lenses, etc... Unfortunately, one of the tubes died. I still remember we were watching Fight Club when it happened. Suddenly I was asking myself if Fight Club always looked like this, nobody else apparently even noticed. But it was clear that we lost the green tube somewhere during the show. It's been dead ever since, but my plan still is to try to revive it once I've the time to do so.

[Marco Giustini]

The Barco Reality 1209 - 9" tubes with electromagnetic focus. I dreamed of that projector so many times

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I loved film and I hope I "did it right" over the years but do we all remember the quality of the (brand new) prints we used to get? And do we all remember the state of those prints after the average cinema handled them for just a few days?

Do you think this could be handled better in 2024?

I know I did it right... Otherwise the many different Cinematographers I worked under would have fired me on the spot. One night after running dailies a first assistant cameraman was fired Johnny on the spot for missing his focus mark in just one scene.

[Gordon McLeod]

I've always thought it would be interesting to have a drum with about 1,000 mirrors on it, each tilted slightly differently. A laser (or several) would point at the drum. As the drum rotates, the reflected beam would scan horizontally, then jump to the next mirror causing the scanning of a line down a bit. This would create a raster with the image created by the laser being modulated.

Eidiphor ysed a raster scanning on a film of oil was a interesting beast