Regarding Aaron's question, the new chips have been mentioned at a couple of the SMPTE Hollywood Section meetings I've attended. (3rd-generation I think. Sounds like a detergent ad, "Now with blacker blacks!") As John mentioned, the new chips match the resolution of the Sony cameras used to originate Star Wars II. Sorry, I have not seen the latest chips myself nor have I talked to anyone who has, but I don't think they are vaporware. The last chips I saw were the current 2G ones at the El Capitan about six months ago (Atlantis) and the ETC a little over a year ago. These 2G chips looked a lot better than the 1G ones used for Star Wars I at the AMC Media Center in Burbank. Those 1G chips suffered from very visible scalloped fixed-pattern noise. Since the summer of 1999 there has been quite an improvement in these chips.

Yes, you can still see pixels with the 2G chips if you sit too close or if you are really looking for them. At the El Cap (screen ~50' wide for scope) I like to sit in the balcony, and at the ETC (~60' wide for scope) near the back, in order to minimize this. At those distances (roughly 4-5 screen heights) with the current chips I believe the average theater-goer wouldn't notice the pixel artifacts.

Oh, don't get me started on edge enhancement! Seems like everyone uses too much. Too much detail or too much aperture correction (boy am I dating myself) are just fancy ways of adding noise to a picture.

Anyway, here's hoping we get to see the latest 3G stuff at ShoWest!

Paul
SMPTE Hollywood Section; temporarily sloughed in Las Vegas
Underemployed mercenary film/video projectionist/engineer
"Otaku wa tsurai yo" <-- Yeah I know, bad pun. Sue me.
It's tough being a fan!

7k bulb for DLP vs 4k bulb for film on the same screen? They really need to fix that. Xenons not be cheap! While what I saw looked pretty good, they still do have a long way to go before it is cheap enough for exhibitors to consider it as a replacement for film.

Scott: Yes, we will have 35mm film prints for backup. I have one setup in the big house (563 seats) and the other in a medium (266 seats). This is how we were able to keep Oceans 11 running for 9 weeks on DLP and other titles. Schedule will probably work out the the large house is occupied for 2 weeks before being release to a new film print. Medium house will run for at least 2 more weeks before attendance forces to go to film prints.

Brad: The chips are the original black chips. I do expect that the heads will be replaced with the new Mark VII heads in time for EP 2.
I have not heard anything about a new chip with "Blacker blacks" although I wouldn't put it past them and being developed.

Screen size I will have in the next couple of days.

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DirectTV and DishNetwork have a fixed amount of bandwidth available for all their channels combined. That is, the transponder has "n" megabits total, which has to be split up between all the channels being carried. The more channels they carry (like when they add local TV stations), the less bandwidth is available for each channel. They can dynamically increase or decrease bandwidth to individual channels, and ppv shows get more than, say, news channels.

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- dave
Look at this! His chin strap has been cut!

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When DTV won the right to carry local programming, they had to increase the amount of compression they use on all services in order to fit the new traffic aboard the then existing payloads, resulting in an increase in visible compression artifacts. Very soon the new DirecTV 4S will be on-line (maybe it is already). The D4S bird (the 'S' means 'spot') will carry the local traffic for the 26 designated markets with a spot beam for each. That will allow the other birds in the constellation to return to lower levels of compression, which should result in better pictures. BTW the DTV HD services weren't affected by any of this--they're on a separate bird.

As for other signal degradations, all of the DTV services are at Ku band, which is somewhat more susceptible to rain fade than C band. I'm not sure about sunspot effects at Ku band, but there are sun outages, which are another issue entirely. Basically you only have to deal with those for a couple of minutes on a couple of days during each equinox. Ephemeris predicts for sun outages are readily available for use by TVRO owners or earth station operators.

And now, back to the movies!

It's awful! I don't know why they even bother to put an S-Video output on the receiver because that just makes it look worse! On the other hand, watching a DVD from an S-Video connection looks great.