Re: Bit off topic ...


"Charles" <charlesschuler@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Arfa Daily" <arfa.daily@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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I went to a cinema last night that I hadn't been to before, to see Ocean's
13. We sat about half way up the theatre, so not too close. Both of us
commented that the picture didn't look *quite* in focus, although that
didn't seem to quite cover it. When the picture stood still though, it was
pin sharp. During the advert session, they mentioned that some sporting
event or other, was going to be covered live via satellite, which got me
thinking that this must be an *electronic* cinema, using DLP projectors.
It then occured to me that what we were seeing as being 'out of focus'
might actually be motion blur, typical of digital display technology. With
this in mind, when I looked even closer, it seemed to me that the picture
was not evenly illuminated either - a bit like I see on this widescreen
LCD monitor that I'm using here. During the main presentation, a
film-stock 'scratch' appeared at the left side of the screen. However, it
went on for a long time, and was absolutely dead straight, although it did
jump back and forth a bit, but very 'precisely'. Also, it's colour seemed
to change with the surrounding content, so if that was black, the
'scratch' would be white, and so on, so I then got to thinking that this
might be an error on a line of mirrors on the DLP chip. As we left the
cinema, I took a look up at the booth window, as best I could, and there
didn't seem to be any film looping around the ceiling that I could see.

So, does anyone out there work on these DLP projectors - either
commercial or domestic ? *Was* it one of them that was showing this film
? Are these DLP chips slow enough that you can see motion blur ? Was that
'scratch' typical of a DLP chip problem ? ( it wasn't there at the
beginning, and it went away before the end )

Sorry it's a bit OT, but it seemed like an interesting subject, with a
potential repair-related angle, and we sometimes have some good
discussions on here about such things.

MPEG compression artifacts are very distracting when the scene is changing
rapidly. Don't know for sure if that is a factor in your post. Satellite
video seems very prone to this phenomenon.

Yes, I've seen that on satellite channels that use a low bandwidth
transponder, where the station presumably has to apply severe levels of
compression to get the data rate down. These are of course the 'cheapo'
stations that can't afford transponders capable of handling high data rates.
When you look at stations like QVC which shows very fine detail stuff like
jewellery, or the premium movie channels, it's much less noticable. I'm also
well familiar with typical motion artifacts that come from both LCD and
plasma display technologies. It's the one thing that has stopped me
replacing my large screen CRT set so far, whilst I hang on and wait to see
what SED has to offer when it finally hits the market. Word is that the
drive system required is much less 'digital' than either LCD or plasma, and
that the individual SED cells are *much* faster. As a result, these displays
are a lot more 'CRT-like', and don't suffer the typical motion artifacts
created by the drive electronics.

Going back to the cinema thing, 'motion artifacts' in the way we
traditionally understand that term, didn't seem to be what we were seeing.
Normally, with 35mm film stock, camera pans appear just as they would with
your own eyes, if you were turning your head. The (apparantly) moving scene
stays in sharp focus. What we saw on any protracted camera pans, was what
appeared to be an annoying shift in focus. No pixellation at edges, or
motion trails on bright or saturated areas. Just what looked like a uniform
shift in focus over the whole screen. You were actually thinking "boy, my
eyes are getting bad". But as soon as the pan slowed to a stop, the focus
was back pin sharp again. It's hard to describe, but it was only a few weeks
ago when Spiderman came out, that I went to a U.S. cinema - actually one in
the Orlando area that's been completely refurbished over the last year -
that was using film (you could see it looping round the ceiling through the
booth window) and I noticed nothing out of the ordinary, at all. The cinema
in my town that I usually go to, also uses genuine film, and I haven't
noticed anything wrong worth commenting on there either, so I'm sure it's
not just me. Plus the fact that my wife said that she was seeing exactly the
same thing, and it was she that made the first comment.

I guess that it might just be the price that we are paying for technological
advance, but I sure hope that this part of the technology doesn't now get
considered 'mature', and all development efforts go into other areas. I
would hate for this to be the future of cinema. In some ways, I think that
all the 'digital' hype is a bit of a con. Yes, it allows a lot of good
things like being able to cram lots more channels into the band space,
eliminating noisy pictures from a poor signal, and ghosting and so on, and
the digital display technology allows for slimline sets, consuming less
power etc, but with the best will in the world, if we're absolutely honest,
the displayed picture doesn't come close to a good CRT set with a good
analogue signal going in, and the same seems to be true now of film stock
versus digital cinema projection.

Arfa


.

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