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 December 1, 2005 Coming Soon to a Digital Theater Near You . . . Several years ago, while doing research for a newspaper article, I visited Electrohome, a venerable Canadian manufacturer of television sets. The visit brought back good memories: The first time I ever saw a really good television picture outside a TV control room was on an Electrohome set, and when it came time for my family to buy its first color TV, an Electrohome was what we got. When I first met my audio-video mentor some years later, I was happy to learn that he had exactly the same set.Based in Kitchener, Ontario, Electrohome got out of consumer TV years ago, but they’ve remained a name in professional circles as Electrohome Projection Systems. Five years ago, they sent me a press release that described Lucasfilm’s use of TV projection in all the postproduction phases of the latest Star Wars epic. The projectors used were based on the Digital Light Processing (DLP) system developed by Texas Instruments, which has since become one of the more prominent technologies for home theaters. I was invited to Kitchener to have a first-hand look at the state of the art of television projection. I went eagerly -- I had seen DLP displays only at electronics shows, and while they were impressive, a show is hardly ideal for accurately judging what a new component or technology is capable of. Back then, the pride of the Electrohome line was the Roadie 12K. As its name suggests, the Roadie was portable, sort of: it was about the size of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and weighed 250 pounds, but it did have handles. The "12K" referred to its brightness, one thing that DLP does really well. Brightness is measured in ANSI lumens, and the Roadie put out 12,000 of them. For comparison, Electrohome told me that a standard film projector with an open gate and no film puts out about 10,000k lumens, a conventional CRT-based front-projection system about 250k. The result from the Roadie 12K was spectacular. Between the time I was invited and actually went to the factory, Electrohome Projection Systems was bought by an American company, Christie Inc., and is now known as Christie Digital Systems. While it was sad to lose a fine representative of Canadian industry to foreign ownership, the acquisition said much about the technological future: Christie, a major producer of conventional film projectors, was hedging their bets. Now, five years later, what could have been a revolution in movie distribution has yet to happen, except in the smallest way. A few theaters have been equipped with digital projectors, and there have been isolated demonstrations using the technology, but we’re still mostly stuck with film. A recent story in the Wall Street Journal recounted the experience of a movie exec who carried a movie to a trade show on a tiny hard drive weighing only ounces, and a competitor who had lugged 175 pounds of film reels aboard his aircraft, and for which he had to pay extra. Ultimately, films would be digitally sent to theaters by satellite, cutting distribution costs to almost nothing. According to the report, the problem is money: Who will pay to upgrade theaters? Until recently, film studios insisted that theaters pay for the new projectors, but the theater chains have balked at the cost of upgrading their thousands of screens. A regular film projector costs $10,000 to $20,000, says the Journal article, compared to something like $100,000 for a digital projector. Also, the report points out, "Maintenance is another concern for theater owners. Regular film projectors last years, often decades, and require upkeep totaling around $1000 per year. Digital projectors are likely to bring maintenance costs of several thousand dollars per year because, like computers, they may develop glitches that require an expert to fix." One proposal is that, instead of paying the $1000 it now costs to ship a film print to a theater, the studio would pay that to the theater directly to offset the cost of switching to digital. But it’s been estimated that it would take something like six years for the costs to be covered; theater owners worry that the equipment itself won’t last anywhere near that long. Still, everyone seems to want this revolution to happen, so it will . . . eventually. Until then, we’ll have to be content to watch digital movies at home, and analog ones when we head to the multiplex. ...Ian G. Masters
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