I am writing to you in regard to a recent article published in TIME entitled "The Death of Film." I have been employed as a professional motion picture projectionist for over 12 years and have found that this article is completely false and represents poor judgment on behalf of Time Magazine to report such false and misleading information.

Film, if presently correctly, does not show wear after it's first run! I have personally run many films with no detectable loss in quality hundreds upon hundreds of runs. Film is by far superior in quality to ANY digital medium currently in development by surpassing it in resolution, sharpness, color, contrast and white balance. The new digital projection systems employ an image compression system that is most noticeable, and results in digital pixel artifacts which appear as block squares.

In this article it was stated that the latest digital projection systems "can deliver images as sharp and rich as the best film print, without ever degrading." This is simply not true! Digital projection quality just isn't there yet. Digital cannot yet accurately reproduce low light and low contrast images the same way that film does. Quite frankly, digital projection cannot deliver the nuances, integrity and richness of color that film provides.

Studios have already implemented a "watermark" technology as a weapon against counterfeiting and piracy used for more than 20 years called CAP-Code. With this technology, pirated material can be traced back to the original screen it was played on.

Film is far from death. Please print a retraction and be more responsible when reporting about the benefits of this new technology.

Regards,

Jeff Skallan
Motion Picture Projectionist

Oh and did you know when you point a video camera at a DLP screen there is little to no flicker?

Any, digital is better? I mave taken my parents' 1960s Bell and Howell Super 8 camera and filmed things that would most probably have ruined a video camera!

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Actually, with most theatres having slide projectors these days, you could make up a couple of slides to do this and it would cost you next to nothing. Just make sure your slide projector puts up a decent image.

""Film Is Dead!" was a banner headline on page one of Daily Variety in 1956 when Ampex invented video-tape. Other predictions that went awry were as follows: Television will kill radio. Television will kill the cinema. Television will create a "theater in every house with benefits for children and cultural education."That last prediction was made in 1930 by David Sarnoff, the founder of NBC and RCA, who apparently didn't envision Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?. A prediction was made that all movies in the future will be produced in 3-D format. All movies will be produced in Cinerama format.All movies will be produced in CinemaScope format.All movies and dramas for television will be produced and distributed in high-definition video format within 10 years. The New York Times made that last prediction in 1982.The moral is that if you are going to predict the future, you'd better have some grounding in the past. Otherwise you are destined to repeat the same mistakes."

Victor J. Kemper, ASC (Past) President
http://www.kodak.ch/US/en/motion/story/commentary.shtml

No lower resolution digital video equipement is ever used."

The paper "Assessing the Quality of Motion Picture Systems from Scene to Digital Data" was published in the February/March 2002 SMPTE Journal.

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