~Manny.

"I have a bad feeling about this."

You acknowledge that the current digital projection system does not put out as sharp a picture as film yet you think it's great and would love to see its wide adoption. Well now you've moved from fact into opinion and that is not something I can argue with. You are welcome to whatever opinion you wish. But you can understand why most of the rest of us would find it a little astonishing that anyone would advocate something that is by everyone's agreement a step backwards in basic image quality. No dirt or scratches is great but those shouldn't be there in the first place and I'm not willing to give up the basic quality of the picture for it.

On the next round when resolution has been up'ed then there will be a lot of people advocating it just as you do (probably me included) because even now they don't have too much farther to go. But they aren't there yet. The business and economic arguments come on top of the quality issues. I won't even get into that because if one is approaching this simply as a moviegoer who either likes or doesn't like what he sees then those are besides the point.

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My own opinion is that there are a number of business people doing some serious arm twisting behind the scenes because they want to make a ton of money off of patents and licensing for these inferior systems. I would not be surprised at all if George Lucas had a seriously vested interest in DLP. Overall, I see the digital projection thing as being a kind of scam using the buzzword "DIGITAL" so a few fellows can make a lot of money. You have to keep in mind that Texas Instruments, JVC and others developing "digital projection" systems are using commercial theaters as a kind of staging area for pushing the same imaging chips into the much more lucrative home theater and personal computing markets. Commercial theaters will never have any exclusivity on high image standards when it comes to digital projection. There are not enough theaters to amortize out the cost of R&D to keep the technology exclusively there. At least movie theaters do have an exclusive when it comes to 35mm and 70mm film projection. Few home owners can install such hardware (much less even run or maintain it properly).

I think the most serious issue is how DLP doesn't even compare favorably to HDTV. That's downright alarming. DLP has a native resolution of 1280 X 1024 --or 1,310,720 pixels. Compare that to the 1080i HDTV format which displays 1080 X 1920 --2,073,600 pixels. You're talking about a 700,000 pixel difference, not to mention HDTV is already a native 16:9 display whereas DLP is 4:3 ratio and has to be anamorphically expanded on any show.

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Imagine how hacked off the guys that bought the old one are going to be when the new ones come out. Course that's the nature of computer stuff isn't it? Every couple of years you have to buy a new one to stay current. So does that mean that it's going to cost $150k every other year to stay digital? Planned obsolescence!!! How much is TI stock now? Hmmmmm

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I would consider 2K the absolute minimum for digital cinema, not only for the reasons Mark just mentioned, but also because of what Bobby mentioned. For obvious reasons, what's in theatres must meet or exceed what people can get at home. Digital cinema must be at least equal to HDTV's "1080i" resolution (1920x1080) in order to be competitive.

As I've mentioned before, if one sits at the SMPTE recommended 2 screen heights distance, a 2.39:1 scope image will take up just over 60 degrees of one's vision. Going by the rule of thumb that the eye can see details as small as one arcminute, that means 3600 pixels are needed across the width of the image to make it appear smooth. Anything at or above that number is what I would consider "enough" resolution. JVC's roadmap for their D-ILA technology claims 4K x 3K by the end of this year. Hopefully that will make its way into theatres.

The worst thing that could happen would be for the exhibition industry to unceremoniously hand everything over to the first company that comes along -- namely TI. They've been sitting at the same resolution for the past five years. If they become the de-facto standard, they will lose any incentive to improve their product. Competition should be given a chance force quality parameters higher than they currently are. I hope that industry inertia against mass conversion will last long enough to for that to happen. I would hate to be stuck watching 1280x1024 for the next 20 years.

By the way Mark, if you're going to complain about being "attacked", perhaps you should go back and re-read the first post you made in this thread. There's an old saying about pots and kettles...