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Topic: TI to do 4K: Cinemark to get the new projectors

Monte L Fullmer
Film God

Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004

posted 06-19-2009 02:22 AM

Think the other three manufacturers will adopt the "LCoS" process, or are they committed to TI and DLP?

Did SONY introduce LCoS, or did a third party invent this process?

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Cameron Glendinning
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 845
From: West Ryde, Sydney, NSW Australia
Registered: Dec 2005

posted 06-19-2009 03:09 AM

I think it was Hughes / JVC that developed LCoS, JVC still makes a home model with the technology.

I remember being very impressed with the first demo I saw of the LCoS technology at a SMPTE show in 2000.

Personally I have only heard good reports about the Sony 4k from those that use it, although its color set up can take a while to set up properly.

Will the layman will they even notice the difference of 4k dlp or LCoS?

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Julio Roberto
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 938
From: Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Registered: Oct 2008

posted 06-19-2009 03:25 AM

There are many players developing their own flavor of Lcos.

The most advanced is JVC with their D-ILA chips. They even have available commercially an 8K projector (and 4K, of course). They haven't developed DCI projectors for movie theatres, though.

Another player that is significant would be Canon. They have a nice line of Lcos front projectors. But none for movie theatres.

And, of course, Sony.

Main problem with Lcos is that they are not very light efficient compared to DLP. They require polarized light plus 4 prism assembly, against DLP that is fine with regular light and only 3 prisms. But on Lcos favor, a system can be developed that renders a 3D system almost as bright as a 2D system while in the DLP camp you usually lose half (or more) of the light to make it "3D".

Also, DLP, being "purely reflective", can take very large lamps w/o "melting". Lcos is transflective, and certain components can be damaged by excessive heat or luminous flux, so they can't really take (reliably) too-high wattage lamps. And cinema applications call for high wattage lamps being used for many hours a day every single day for "20 years".

Otherwise, and IN (total) THEORY, LCos is everybit as good IF NOT BETTER than DLP in image quality. Now, in practical terms, Lcos has some manufacturing difficulties that MAY impare the quality a bit in SOME products, etc, while DLP is a very solid, very well developed for years solution that is "bullet-proof".

There is also the possibility that Lcos may be a bit less durable than DLP, but again, within comparison and it's not 100% required that they last less.

What I mean is:

In THEORY, Lcos COULD (on paper) be every bit as good as DLP OR BETTER, except in brightness. And DLP could, on paper, be virtually as good as Lcos, while surpassing in brightness.

In PRACTICE Lcos current offers have slight advantages in some image quality parameters (fill-factor="screen door", smooth color transitions) while DLP has others (less motion blur, better uniformity, longevity, ...)

Both technology COULD be indistinguishable to the layman (it doesn't mean they currently are).

About fabrication costs, I'm not an expert. My understanding is that DLP is made in a regular semiconductor line and only the last step, the packaging, is done by custom machinery. And I believe TI outsources the packaging and it's done by another company outside TI.

Lcos only does the first so-many steps on a regular semiconductor line. Then the liquid cristal part must be done on an LC line. They probably have this line custom tooled to do the packaging as well.

My total wild guess is that Sony's particular flavor of LCos is about the same price at 4K as TI is at 2K. They are actually "cheaper", but they are "more expensive" as a final product due to the added optical line (4 prisms against 3) and larger chip size.

Sony's 4K chips are slightly larger, at 1.55" (against TI's 1.2" for 2K) accounting for the higher cost of projectors due to larger lenses/prisms/rod integrators/etc. I guess you could think 70mm against 35mm and figure one projector/lens/print should be significantly cheaper than the other. But in this case, it's not. TI charges about the same for 2K as Sony for 4K.

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Lyle Romer
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1400
From: Davie, FL, USA
Registered: May 2002

posted 06-19-2009 05:32 AM

A couple of things I thought about last night:

First, in regards to the screen door effect, if this is actually a native 4k DLP chip of the same size as the 2k chip isn't it possible the screen door effect will be worse? I can't imagine that the space between pixels can be scaled down in half that easily (since I would assume that the original DLP design tried to minimize the gaps) so the same size chip will have 4x the screen door lines magnified by the same factor.

If it is wobulation, they should be able to get a decent frame refresh rate. Home "1080P" wobulation sets with color wheel have to show at least 6 "parts" for each frame (2 wobulation spots and 3 color wheel spots) at 60 fps so the chip has to show 360 fps. Even if they were doing 4x wobulation you would think they can do a 96Hz refresh rate with the right formatter board design. If they designed it so the 2k chip would be shown once for each "corner" of the image so that you actually displayed 4096x2160 unique pixels it could look very good. My skepticism is that from my understanding home wobulation always mixes 2 half pixels to form a pixel. While it reduces screen door you really can't get a perfect representation of the pixel.

Some of the people on here seem to have contacts within TI. Please ask your sources if this will be a native 4k 1.2" DLP chip or some kind of wobulation.

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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 06-19-2009 05:49 AM

Anything short of a true 4K chip will be viewed as a scam...Sony already has a true 4K imager...their pixel spacing is also VERY tight.

Another thing moving in LCoS' favor would be a change to Lasers as light sources...it would give LCoS much more light producing capability than it has now...it would also help on the color front.

Steve

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Julio Roberto
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 938
From: Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Registered: Oct 2008

posted 06-19-2009 06:47 AM

quote: Lyle Romer
If it is wobulation, they should be able to get a decent frame refresh rate. Home "1080P" wobulation sets with color wheel have to show at least 6 "parts" for each frame (2 wobulation spots and 3 color wheel spots) at 60 fps so the chip has to show 360 fps. Even if they were doing 4x wobulation you would think they can do a 96Hz refresh rate with the right formatter board design.

Re-doing the math, I end up with 90hz rather than 96hz, but not that important. Of course, in home applications, they are only dealing with a 960x1080 matrix.

My calculations were based on what they currently can do. Just a few short (around 9) months ago, the DCI projectors were incapable of full resolution at 48fps (3D) to triple flash at 144hz. Only recently have they been able to do 1980x1080x48x3.

One must assume that, since their most expensive projectors only recently adquired that possibility, that's probably around their bandwidth limit.

Based on those calculations, I get my figures.

Indeed if they can do 2K at over 144hz at full contrast at TWO different wobbulation angles (2 on each spatial direction), then perhaps they can get over 36hz refreshes.

But that would be only giving some formatting bandwidth we have not yet seen from TI before.

Can they do it? I would guess on theory, perhaps. But I'm not sure a DLP can take much more refresh rate w/o impairing the contrast. Perhaps home applications have a reduced contrast to allow for the 60fps 2xwobbulatedx3colorwheeled applications.

Don't know.

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John T. Hendrickson, Jr
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 889
From: Freehold, NJ, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 06-19-2009 10:01 AM

With all these announcements, what happens to 2K? How long will the companies support it? Are the 2K folks shit out of luck, so to speak?

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Julio Roberto
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 938
From: Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Registered: Oct 2008

posted 06-19-2009 10:16 AM

TI, for whatever reason (pbbly technological walls) "loves" 2K. So as long as they are in business and still offering the product, I say they'll support it.

If TI were to do "the right thing", which is to offer a very cheap 2K small projector for budget applications and then two affordeable 4K projectors for real cinemas (one for small screens, one for large), 2K support could dissapear if there was no demand whatsoever for the 2K and everybody chose 4K over it.

But they are still pushing 2K down the throat even today, announcing a miriad of 2K offers and offering nothing in 4K for a full year and hinting it will be "extra" (=expensive).

I think they are [sex]

us.

At least now we'll see a ton of 4K DI's for sure, so the 35mm prints will start once again to look good and cinemas with 35mm film will have an advantage over those with 2K ....

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 06-19-2009 11:26 AM

quote: Steve Guttag
Thats just it...technology wise...TI is in a pickle. 4K cost 4 times as much to make as 2K. There is no way they can make a 4K imager for the price of a 2K imager and Sony is selling their 4K systems in the same ballpark as TI's 2K.

There is one way TI can reduce the cost: miniaturization of scale.

3 or more years have passed since TI introduced their 2K DLP chip. Computer chip manufacturing techniques have improved at least a generation or two since then. Intel is moving to 32 nanometer processes for making its CPUs for 2009-2010.

Obviously a DLP chip could not be made so small or thin as a traditional CPU or DSP chip because of the moving parts, but perhaps certain advancements could help reduce the size of those spinning mirrors to scale down DLP chip sizes. That in turn would make 2K DLP chips less expensive to fabricate since more would fit on a computer chip production wafer. With enough miniaturization one could indeed fit 4K worth of spinning DLP mirrors into the footprint of the current 2K chip.

The big question is what kind of progress, if any at all, has Texas Instruments made in scaling down the parts sizes of DLP chips? The question would be answered when we find out the actual native resolution of these "enhanced DLP" chips.

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-19-2009 03:36 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
spinning DLP mirrors

Er, ah... actually they don't spin... they vibrate extremely rapidly. I can't remember the +/- angle they are capable of off the top of my head... It's the dolby wheel that spins.

Mark

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Alan Gouger
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 501
From: Bradenton, FL, USA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 06-19-2009 08:17 PM

Im going to predict no product until end of 2010 into 2011 at the earliest.
The PR will cause some fence sitters which is what TI wants. This still leaves Sony with the advantage and they may win further market shares.

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-20-2009 08:54 AM

quote: Alan Gouger
The PR will cause some fence sitters which is what TI wants.

I think you hit the nail on the head there Alan!!

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 06-20-2009 11:26 AM

The act of promoting vaporware is a tactic that works. Dolby did much to seal the fate of Cinema Digital Sound with its March 1991 press release about Dolby Digital, never mind the final product didn't roll out to movie theaters until June of 1992. That's just one example. The computing industry, video gaming industry and many others use the ploy all the time.

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Ron Curran
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 504
From: Springwood NSW Australia
Registered: Feb 2006

posted 06-20-2009 10:09 PM

Yes, and the only time I have ever seen a Dolby person was at a demo (by invite) of Dolby Digital, using a makeshift reader. This was a few months before DTS was introduced.

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-22-2009 06:03 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
The act of promoting vaporware is a tactic that works. Dolby did much to seal the fate of Cinema Digital Sound with its March 1991 press release about Dolby Digital

Actually it was much more then that!!! There was a big hoopla with a crowd of a couple thousand present (I was there) at Showest when Ioan Allen made the announcement to all there. I'm quite sure the press release came afterwords. One thing you can bet though is that Dolby had already worked out enough of the technology to know they could do this in a reaosnable amount of time. One might view Dolby's DA-10 and CAT 699 reader and their 2K version of Dolby Digital... whilst the DA-20 and Cat 700 and up were the 4K versions.

Mark

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