CinemaCon 2026

[Mike Blakesley]

Post your thoughts if you’re there.

Seems like one of the big things this year is acoustically transparent LCD screen panels.

Sony’s slate was 2 hits and a lot of filler. Heading to the WB show now. .

[Steve Guttag]

And by LCD you mean LED. LED screens with 2.5mm dot-pitch and substantially acoustically transparent is shown by GDC. Strong is showing a "Hey LED" acoustically transparent screen too (more than 3.5mm dot pitch). This stuff is looking better and better and performing better and better. I think this is definitely the future. We're not there yet but when the cost is there (and it is getting better) and such, I think it will switch the industry about as fast as digital displaced film, when it comes to new builds and even for conversions.

I really don't think 300-Nit laser will made enough inroads before 300+ Nit LED screens take over. As it is now, the LED screens are in the same ballpark as the HDR projectors (not quite as cheap, particularly when factoring installation and infrastructure but even that is declining substantially).

That's my take.

Oh and Boston Light and Sound have a new "DTS" player that looks like the evolution of the XD10. It is called the TS-1. So, the future of playing 70mm may be a bit more secure as we are no longer dependent on 20+ year old computers to keep going using adapters to get modern stuff in there.

Another big theme that I already knew about...the price and availability of memory and memory adjacent things. So, actual RAM and SSDs are getting stupid-expensive. You'll do a double take when you get even conventional computers and compare pricing from just a few months ago. So, expect TMS computers, SMS servers (from ALL brands) to be a LOT more money. If you can live with spinning-rust drives, life will be cheaper for the foreseeable future. On a Dolby IMS3000, the price difference between the 4TB using SSDs is getting much closer to using their NAS to get 10.5TB. They also still have their 1TB HDDs if only the filmmakers didn't make their epics that need 300+GB.

[Leo Enticknap]

I was there over the weekend to work the booth build, but had to go back to SoCal yesterday morning due to a bunch of service calls that can't wait. I'd be intrigued to know more about the new DTS player - can't find anything about it on BLSI's website.

[Steve Guttag]

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This is what it looks like.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It's not really a looker, but I guess it's good that someone is keeping the spirit of DTS (or what's the official name for the format nowadays?) alive.

Regarding those hardware prices, it's really out of this world and it affects everything with "bytes"... The same SSD-based USB sticks I bought for 30 euros last year now cost somewhere around 120 euros...

If I'd decommission all our 3-year old hardware in our equipment room, I could probably sell it for more than we bought it...

As for LED walls: those 3.5 mm pitch walls are suitable for the really big rooms I guess, those with sufficient room between the first row and the screen.

[Ioannis Syrogiannis]

Wondering what is the peak power consumption of those LED screens.

[Bobby Henderson]

I'd really like to see how these acoustically transparent LED boards are built. Normally any LED "jumbotron" is made up of a bunch of driver board tiles. Each tile has a bunch of its own electronics components, fans, wiring, etc. It would be interesting to see how all those kinds of components are treated in one of these new LED screens.

Of course the other really big issue with these LED boards is servicing them. Any LED board is going to get stuck pixels or other problems over enough time. How do those issues get repaired? LED boards have a great deal of color adjustment latitude. You can drop in a replacement driver board tile and adjust its brand new color to match up with all the other tiles on the existing LED board to avoid a quilted appearance. I would imagine these LED movie screens would need a feature like that. The companies selling these LED screens had better be able to offer service plans/contracts.

I'm glad to see Boston Light & Sound introduce a new DTS player. I would assume they're going to be making new film readers as well. Those would have to include 4/35 and 5/70, but I wonder if the 8/35 thing from "One Battle After Another" is going to be a one-off event or if other movie productions will use it. Again, if they're introducing a new DTS player, would that new device include support for newer audio formats? It would be nice to be able to sync a 5/70mm print with a Dolby Atmos or DTS-X audio track. At the very least 5/70mm should be getting matched up with lossless audio tracks in 5.1 or 7.1 channel layouts.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Of course the other really big issue with these LED boards is servicing them. Any LED board is going to get stuck pixels or other problems over enough time. How do those issues get repaired? LED boards have a great deal of color adjustment latitude. You can drop in a replacement driver board tile and adjust its brand new color to match up with all the other tiles on the existing LED board to avoid a quilted appearance. I would imagine these LED movie screens would need a feature like that. The companies selling these LED screens had better be able to offer service plans/contracts.

Since a LED wall adds weight, in many cases of a retrofit, the stage area will probably require some work. I guess the best way to go forward is to have a scaffold on the back of the screen and easy cherrypicker access to the front of the screen.

Not only new LED panel segments need calibration, they also need to be recalibrated as they age. Most LED screens get calibrated with one or two cameras. Big installations like LED volumes have fixed cameras installed to perform this calibration. I guess you could do the same here.

[Bobby Henderson]

Since a LED wall adds weight, in many cases of a retrofit, the stage area will probably require some work. I guess the best way to go forward is to have a scaffold on the back of the screen and easy cherrypicker access to the front of the screen.

It would be ridiculous for any theater operator to assume they could simply drape a LED-based screen in place of an existing cinema screen. However, with these new LED screens being acoustically transparent the design of the LED tiles would have to be very different -assuming there are LED tiles being used at all.

In order for these LED screens to allow sound to pass thru that would require a lot of the bulky components to either be radically miniaturized and/or be located off to one or more edges of the screen. Miniaturization of components could cut down on weight. Just the act of redesigning LED panels from being solid tiles to something porous to allow sound to pass thru would reduce weight.

Still, any LED-based cinema screen would need structural frame or cabinet to hold the LED board. Such a frame/cabinet could features built into it for holding speaker cabinets. Hopefully the companies promoting these new LED screens have designed the screens where they can be serviced from the front via a scissor lift. If you have 3 or 5 towers of speakers behind the screen that would interfere with servicing it from the back. But then again, if the screen design moves a bunch of the electrical components to the edges of the screen then that would make service jobs easier.

I'm also wondering about unwanted audio reflections being caused by these LED screens. A solid plastic board would be bad, even if all the LED clusters have their own tiny plastic louvers. If the boards are porous they may do more to absorb reflecting audio waves. Some of this stuff makes me think of the old THX baffle wall design from theaters in the past.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I've worked with acoustically and light transparent LED screens in the past, but their dot-pitch is usually far larger than 2.5 or 3.5mm, more in the centimeter range. They're also usually far less modular, since they reduce strutting, frames and cabling on the back to a minimum, moving stuff like drivers away from the screen. They also sometimes suffer from overheating, due to lack of ventilation.

Modern mobile LED screens are far more modular and also require minimal extra structural frames, because they've built-in structural framing. The biggest bulk is usually the driving circuitry on the back, often with quite heavy heatsinks or even fans. Those kind of modules are not really suitable for transparent audio. Here is an example from some Chinese manufacturer. Those Chinese manufacturers are really making inroads and eating the lunch of the likes of Daktronics.
One Idea I've had is to integrate speakers into the LED panel modules, this way, the speakers and LED become a more integrated package, tightly coupled to decrease the chances of nasty interference. You could also combine the cooling of both the LED module, speaker drivers and LED drivers into the back of the screen. This way, the LED screen could become one big speaker array. Obviously, not all tiles would have to be both LED screen and speaker array, but the idea, at least to me, sounds interesting.

Unwanted audio reflections from big LED screens are a thing. Fortunately, in a cinema setup, you don't have much sound directed at the screen. But you really should try to avoid your surround speakers hitting the screen and fitting anti-reflective surfaces onto the three non-screen walls and ceiling is ever more important.

[Harold Hallikainen]

The integration of loudspeakers into the LED array is interesting. Instead of having a big transducer behind the screen, have a whole bunch of small ones, perhaps between the LED pixels, or perhaps the LED pixels themselves could move. With a BUNCH of electronics, the source of the sound could precisely follow the image source of the sound.

[Sean McKinnon]

Thanks guys. We have been working on this since 2022 and are super excited about it! I can say that right now we can do 16 channels uncompressed with a digital AES-3 output and IAB in some form is on the road map for implementation. Big shout out to FT members Thomas Piccione and Kyle Mikolajczyk for their hard work and efforts on this project

[Marcel Birgelen]

What format PCM audio do you support, standard uncompressed PCM in a DCP? How do you sync this with DTS timecode?

Combining film and IAB would really be a game changer... especially for 70MM, combining two of the most "premium experiences" in moviegoing at the time.

The integration of loudspeakers into the LED array is interesting. Instead of having a big transducer behind the screen, have a whole bunch of small ones, perhaps between the LED pixels, or perhaps the LED pixels themselves could move. With a BUNCH of electronics, the source of the sound could precisely follow the image source of the sound.

If you have IAB sound, and the audio in as an "object" and not a "bed" you can render it exactly where it needs to be.

It would be interesting if you could create a sound field at least equal to what current stage speakers deliver, based on a few thousand piezo speakers for example...

[Pietro Clarici]

Does anyone have specs for the new Sharp/NEC projectors? What models are they replacing? The press release is pretty vague and my dealer seems to be quite out of the loop.
I only managed to find a "NC-2045m" sign on one of their Instagram pictures.

[Kyle Mikolajczyk]

What format PCM audio do you support, standard uncompressed PCM in a DCP? How do you sync this with DTS timecode?

Combining film and IAB would really be a game changer... especially for 70MM, combining two of the most "premium experiences" in moviegoing at the time.



If you have IAB sound, and the audio in as an "object" and not a "bed" you can render it exactly where it needs to be.

It would be interesting if you could create a sound field at least equal to what current stage speakers deliver, based on a few thousand piezo speakers for example...

Yes standard uncompressed PCM will be supported, for example 16 bit signed/unsigned lossless PCM. There will be a lot of flexibility for post-production to decide on the audio format to distribute, on top of the legacy format. As for the "how", well timecode is just timecode at the end of the day, if you know where you are in the film, you know where in the sound you are.

I'm very grateful to Sean and Thomas for their passion in bringing film-sound into the 21st century, and thankful for others such as David Ferguson (who is an expert on film timecode)