Sony to Stop Manufacturing Digital Cinema Projectors

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I can say, from the onset, Sony was VERY "put-off-ish" to us.

They treated us the exact same way at Claco when I worked for them. They also tried to go direct sales to several of our customers, one that had 130 screens, and one of them almost fell for it. The good thing is that was the same year Series 2 DLP came out and I was able to steer that customer towards that instead The other funny thing is that is the same customer that replaced a lot of the DFP-2000 Sony SDDS systems with CP-650's because they quit playing back new prints after about 10 days. Its like people never learn!

The other thing about Sony, and the only "advantage" there really is is the fact that the projector can do absolute black. But by code, at least in this country, there is no theater that can do absolute black on the screen because of egress lighting requirements. Of course this is different in a home theater where one can do what one wants.

[Marco Giustini]

4000:1 contrast ratio is not absolute black, Mark! It's "much better black" and it's noticeable in the average auditorium. Particularly when you compare it to 1600:1 of some DLPs!

[Brad Miller]

Maybe Sony had the right idea. After all if you turn the bulb/laser down on a DLP projector to Sony levels, it's pretty impressive how black the blacks get. :P

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

4000:1 contrast ratio is not absolute black, Mark! It's "much better black" and it's noticeable in the average auditorium.

I know that's true, but I dunno what the minimum spec is in the different countries in Europe for egress lighting are. Here there are minimum definite egress light level specs and they can vary from county to county, which IMHO are too high which causes at least a little screen reflection. Then you have the diffusion, scatter and reflection the screen itself causes. SMPTE was working on a way to actually spec this stray light at one time to try to come up with a standard for it. BUt the last time I attended a meeting where that was discussed was at ShoWest and most of the people on the SMPTE board are either dead, retired or have moved on to other fields.

The other down side is the high maintenance level the Sony projectors need. This is just one of many reasons they never worked out well in the big chains.

[Marco Giustini]

I see what you mean, Mark, but 4000:1 is a definite and noticeable improvement in an average auditorium. If we're talking between 10.000 and 100.000:1 then I could agree that the background light level may make the extra contrast useless. But between 1600:1 and 4000:1 I feel the improvement is huge in the average auditorium. At least I could see it in the average UK room - we have emergency lights here too and some chains keep the ceiling lights slightly on during the feature presentation.

[Stefan Scholz]

4000:1 contrast ratio is not absolute black, Mark! It's "much better black" and it's noticeable in the average auditorium. Particularly when you compare it to 1600:1 of some DLPs!

In my measurements it was 5600 : 1 on our Sony. Admittedly directly after service/ PCAB, and the portglass removed, smallest image on screen, safety lighting in the room off.
Measured in chequer pattern. This is better, than we got with film, which came up to 2800:1 with the latest Isco USP and Schneider Premiere lenses. Basically it's the same league.

Same measurement done with a Barco Kinotone DP 4k32B, I measured between 12 and 15 to 1 in chequer pattern. Compared to that the Sony was really black.
But admittedly those are non real life conditions . There's a porthole glass, there is a machine that sees rare service.
In reality it still will be in excess of my measurements with the Barco 4k, as also that example wasn't real, as the seller's service "never found a problem" until the unit was out of warranty. The light engine was defective from day 1.

What good is a projector, that requires a lot of maintenance, as we know theatres rarely do it?
And in my case, even though being a Sony trained installers that did hundreds of these boxes, I avoid theatres advertising Sony 4k, unless we service them, and minimum quality can be assured.
I do not like to see black and white that has all kinds of color effects over the image, which are real in most sites. Or even worse those "PLF" multi projector sets. How like is it that they are convergent. You can find units, that operate on different lamp settings in 3 D mode, that use 3 lamps in 2D mode, where a single projector with 6 lamps would do the full brightness without convergence issues. Just a bad system.

[Marco Giustini]

Indeed 4000:1 is "typical", you can usually get more (or a bit less).
5600:1 "ANSI" is A LOT. As you noticed a DLP machine won't be able to do that. Bear in mind that the auditorium will definitely affect that measurement unless it's completely black (fabric, paint ecc) and it would still affect it even if black. To measure the ANSI that the machine can output you can aim the meter at the projector. At that point the readings will be so much higher and the room should not affect the result.

I have to agree that the "real world" conditions are usually not good for a system that requires lots of maintenance. But let's not forget that that's the reason why we dropped 35mm too. How common was to attend an awful presentation with prints in horrible conditions?

Personally I don't like this "dumbing down" attitude to be honest.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I don't hate Sony projectors, but neither do I love them. (To be honest, I seldomly fall "in love" with modern equipment anyway, since all of it has some issues.) I think they've had their niche in smaller auditoriums, while still offering 4K. With a screen in the right dimension and the picture well calibrated, and the room sufficiently dark, the images look very "film-like", the almost complete absence of a visible pixel grid helps a lot in this. The problem is, and I'm repeating what others already stated, without proper maintenance, the image quickly turns into a complete and utter shit-show. Also, many of those projectors are unfortunately used on screens that are too large for them to handle. Cranking up the light to maximum will only increase the problem of gamma and uniformity degradation and potentially blow up your light engine.

Sony might have been the first in the race with 4K and even 4K as the default and only offering, but unfortunately, their products never really scaled for the biggest screens. It's clear that their LCoS based technology has heat issues, like most LCD based technologies. You've seen others, like Epson invest in more heat-resistant reflective LCD panels, with chips based on quartz instead of silicon, but Sony never really put some real efforts into their SXRD technology after its initial conceptions. I guess the problems with their imaging technology and raw light power, also explains their absence in the "big venue" projector market. So, this leaves their "bigger projector" market solely to the niche market of DCI. Like it was pointed out before, the DCI market only was somewhat of a mass-market in that few years when everybody was forced to switch to digital. Right now it's largely a replacement market, aside from the few new builds that are happening.

And in this replacement market, which is largely driven by laser-sources, Sony cannot really follow with their imaging technology. They may swap mercury lamps with phosphor laser, but it will not come close to what you can do with 3P, 6P or even high-powered xenon systems.
So, I guess the core of their problem is that they were at a dead-end with their SXRD technology. Switching over to TI probably isn't feasible due to licensing issues and I guess in part also Sony's pride. Unfortunately, there aren't any real competitors to DLP/MEMS systems when it comes to handling high-power light sources, so Sony would've been forced to put in some considerable research to come up with a new or highly improved version of SXRD. This is a path they didn't take and as such, they were starting to fight a losing battle a few years back already, when the first 3P and 6P based laser machines appeared.

So, with no real market left and no future in the Big Venue market for their machines, there was probably not much left than to pull the plug. To be honest, they aren't missed in the big-venue projector market. Even if they would end up building an otherwise excellent product, many of those "big venue" projectors end up being integrated into (semi) automated systems, like stage shows, projection shows, theme park rides, you name it. You really can't have a manufacturer hiding their interopability protocols, as their stuff is supposed to seamlessly work together with lots of other stuff that doesn't carry the Sony brand.

Sony is a strange company to work with, even for a closed culture, like the Japanese culture, it's often even difficult just to buy products from them, because there do not seem to be any distributors for it in your region and they're not interested in "small fish" like you... It's true that they bypassed many DCI integrators, especially in the beginning. To some extend that they even did direct business with some smaller independent cinemas back here in Europe. "The message was: You don't need an integrator, we're all you need."

I know a few that were burned badly by this. They got their Sony gear on VPF, were quite happy at first they could advertise with "the only 4K shop in town" (although there were almost no 4K releases back then), but were essentially left to rot and having them figuring it out themselves when their whites on screen faded to magic mushroom rainbow colors, while their T-Cores all were burned to death.

I think the image correction system should've been an integral part of the design of the system. Including a way to automatically run it every few production hours. Also, Sony should've proactively warned everybody, especially those they "serviced" without an integrator, about how to avoid premature T-Core meltdown...

[Marco Giustini]

I think the image correction system should've been an integral part of the design of the system. Including a way to automatically run it every few production hours.

The fun part is that... it was! It was called the PCAT and it was mentioned in the service manual - to be performed every 5000 hours if I remember right. I have never seen it and I am told it was quite cumbersome to use. Sony waited quite a lot of time before the PCAB was released, including the PCAB-G (only Gamma and WB capable) that was supposed to be used by the projectionist. The "user interface" of that thing was a 7-segment 2-digits thing if memory serves. While a Raspberry Pi could be bought for £35, that contraption was what Sony was giving to the user - and it was not £35!! And yes, it would run on RS232!

To be honest, I feel Sony improved on the heat issue and optical blocks reliability, particularly on the 500 series.

[Carsten Kurz]

The PCAT was notebook/windows based. It used a firewire camera. As a matter of fact, you can now buy that camera on ebay for little money and use the PCAT software if you want. The PCAT software was built for the 220/320, but could be used with the 5xx as well.
The PCABs were standalone units and had a hefty price (not uncommon to other tech tools, though, like color meters), but they were meant to be used by techs and integrators during maintenance.
With the DS systems, the PCABs were a standard accessory and were to be run automatically for all DS adjustment features (also geometrical).

[Marco Giustini]

Indeed, Carsten.

But the DS version of the PCAB was only doing geometrical adjustments - could you also use it for gamma and uniformity? I cannot remember that, I only installed a handful of those.
A DS system is complex per se. But I have to say that the PCAB system was working fine. It was just a matter of following the alignment procedure etc. One bit advantage of that system was that once the picture was warped to converge perfectly you could still switch between Flat and Scope using the lens and the alignment would remain good on screen.

[Marcel Birgelen]

The fun part is that... it was! It was called the PCAT and it was mentioned in the service manual - to be performed every 5000 hours if I remember right. I have never seen it and I am told it was quite cumbersome to use. Sony waited quite a lot of time before the PCAB was released, including the PCAB-G (only Gamma and WB capable) that was supposed to be used by the projectionist. The "user interface" of that thing was a 7-segment 2-digits thing if memory serves. While a Raspberry Pi could be bought for £35, that contraption was what Sony was giving to the user - and it was not £35!! And yes, it would run on RS232!

To be honest, I feel Sony improved on the heat issue and optical blocks reliability, particularly on the 500 series.

What I mean with that was that just in the later DS systems, like Carsten mentioned, the PCAB should've been an integrated thing or at least a standard accessory. Something the projectionist or theater tech could do at the flick of a button.
Barco managed to build auto-convergence and color correction cameras into their later models of CRT projectors, which greatly reduced the hassle of constant manual adjustments, which were about the same price tag as the 220/230.

[Marco Giustini]

To be fair with Sony, you do not need to tweak colour or uniformity every day! Once a year is ok and that's when a service visit is happening. As I mentioned earlier on, if you plan NOT to have an annual service visit and keep your projectors unattended until they stop working, then a SONY projector is not for you.

The reason why Sony has become infamous about their picture quality is because for a number of years they were installing projectors in big chains and NO adjustment tool was available, hence WB, gamma and uniformity was just eft degrading.

CRT convergence adjustment can be compared to aligning a DS system and those systems were sold from the beginning with the PCAB machine in the box which would do exactly that.

PS: the PCAB-G (Gamma only) was actually designed for the projectionist to use so they could adjust gamma and WB "at the press of a button". Indeed it never worked that way for a number of reasons!

[Chris Horak]

Yup. Already sold one. It is the "twin" to the Denon DN500BDMKII (look at them side-by-side, front and back). It suffers the same thing as the Denon. The Ethernet port powers down when in standby! Dumb. Even the Sony UBP-X1100ES doesn't do that!

I haven't integrated it into Q-SYS yet but I'm sure that is coming (on the Tascam). The problem is, I see most of our new installations going 4K so a 1080 player may not be as appealing. Thus far, this year, all of the 4K systems the customer has opted for a 4K player. As you know, they new 4K RGB laser projectors are not priced into the stratosphere anymore and are actually pretty much price competitive with Xenon (far cheaper when electricity and lamps are factored in) so I do finally see cinema moving beyond 2K.

I don't recall on the Tascam (only sold one, thus far) but I liked that the Denon, upon getting 120V, powers on rather than have to be powered on. I also like its 1U rack consumption.

Not to derail this thread further, and I'm a little late, but Tascam does sell an updated 4K UHD version of this player (now with HDMI passthrough and USB 3) if looking for a non-Sony 4K professional option.

https://tascam.com/us/product/bd-mp4k

Price is about the same as the Sony option as well.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The real issue with using Sony was in the big chains like AMC. They had so many and Sony's do require more frequent calibration. They did not have enough service techs to keep after them. The image quality was often dreary and not even watchable. Not knowing if an AMC site haws Sony or not is what keeps me from going to their theaters. Sure, you get 4000:1 ratio out of a well calibrated projector, but you get crap out of the ill maintained Sony's. Then there is the 3-D lens system that is beyond stupid.