Thoughts on IMB's

[Armand Daiguillon]

Hi all,

I recently had an IMB go down, (GDC SX-3000) there was a power failure that lasted too long and while the certs were fine other issues happened that caused the unit to no longer function per GDC tech support.
They offered to sell me a refurb of another SX-3000 or to go with an SX-4000.
Now i've had good luck with the 3000's previously .... although now that they are ageing perhaps the 4000 is a better choice.
Thing is, I vaguely remember some people on here saying that the 4000's were nothing but trouble. (I have SR-1000's in service also ...but i'm not a fan for many reasons)
Are there other refurb/used IMB's that maybe are worth considering ? (this one would be going into an NEC900c)


And one other quick question .... I have a CDXL-21S bulb in a Solaria one projector that is starting to have a flickering issue.
I have not seen one of these bulbs at end of life so I don't know if this is because of that ? (the CDXL-16M's tend to just go dim rather than flicker)
But the unit has had numerous "ballast com errors" (or similar ballast errors) at boot up that caused the bulb to not strike at all. So i'm wondering if the ballast is more likely the cause of the flicker ?

Thoughts ?


Thanks all !!!


Armand

[Marcel Birgelen]

My experience is too limited to really single out any current model based on my own experience, but I've had little reliability issues until now with the IMS3000. Probably not the cheapest option, but gets the job done and a logical choice if you want to do Atmos in a mostly digital room.

[Tj Hopland]

What don't you like about the SR-1000?

Did you recently change this machine to the 21 from a 16?

[Steve Guttag]

We all have our different experiences because, unlike you, I HATE (and I mean HATE) the SX-3000. It is right down there with the Christie IMB-S2 with a 100% failure rate for me. I don't like it, its slow-ass UI, its perpetual failures and the often accompanying PSD with its ever so delicate, short-ass eSATA cable. (Do you get the picture of how much I dislike it).

I don't have any experience with the SX-4000 so it may be great but it looked too close to the SX-3000 for me so I passed on that one as it didn't seem to offer anything of value over what I was using.

Now, the SR-1000...complete opposite experience. Yes, it takes 438 days to boot up but once booted, they've been pretty rock solid for us. We've used them with Enterprise storage (still delicate eSATA cable but does not seem to get into issues as much as with PSDs) as well as with 4TB Cine-Cache. I've had one young (less than a year) unit get a corrupt Cine-Cache that needed to be replaced and one that needed its internal CAT7 cable be reseated (that flat black one that is near the HDMI port stuff)...that's it. It's been just rock solid. With Cine-Cache, its transfer speeds, even with the show running have been great.

Personally, I like the new UI much better than the old one too. The only real head-scratcher, for me, was the removal of automation commands from the left column on the Edit screen. I also hope they homogenize the various software/firmware versions rather than having so many variants of 17.x.

So, is the SR-1000 a 10 out of 10? No...nothing has been, to date. It is probably 7-8/10 for me.

The Dolby IMS3000 is another option but a completely different UI. It is mostly solid, once it boots up but booting up is not its strong suit. You can count on them having a boot up issue, at least, once a year, if you power cycle daily. it may not sound like a lot but when you scale that out over many of them...it adds up. They also seem to have clock drift issues over a significant number of them whereby, within a years's time, they will exceed DCI range and you'll need a DRM to extend the range.

The IMS2000 was solid for us (more so than the IMS3000).

While the IMS3000 can (and will) develop a corrupt OS drive, you can run it off of a suitable USB stick, indefinitely. It also uses a super-capacitor so no batteries to change...ever.

As to the lamps...I have not used that model. However, as you get that sized projector hotter (really over 1800-watts) it seems to cook lamps. I get much better life on CDXL-18s than CDXL-20s in the CP2210/CP2215. I can believe, easily, CDXL-21S having life issues.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Yes, it takes 438 days to boot up but once booted, they've been pretty rock solid for us.

With those kind of boot times I was wondering if there is a market for pre-booted SR-1000's.

While the IMS3000 can (and will) develop a corrupt OS drive, you can run it off of a suitable USB stick, indefinitely.

According to Dolby it was just a bad batch of "SSDs" and the issue is solved now, right? .

But yeah, I've an emergency "EBUSB" stick tie-wrapped to the pedestal of the projector, just in case of...

[Armand Daiguillon]

In response to Steve and TJ -

The SR1000's constantly freeze up and need reboots. The interface is also extremely laggy when actually controlling a movie. But my biggest pet peeve on it is the loss of the VGA port, meaning for trouble issues you can only log in remotely - you can no longer connect directly. This makes all kinds of trouble shooting a pain.

I have seen a lot of used/refurb Christie "S2" IMB's are these worth looking at ?


As to the bulb, I guess the main question is if a flicker is normal for this bulb at end of life ? Or is the flicker more likely a symptom of whatever ballast issues exist getting worse ?

Thanks !

[Dave Macaulay]

Flicker can happen to any xenon lamp after a bunch of hours, the electrode tips can grow "horns" that the arc dances between. The arc is moving around on the mirror focus point and light intensity flickers. I don't know what causes the growths.
Ballast issues are uncommon. With film in 24FPS projection a bad ballast with high AC ripple in the lamp DC power would show up on screen, the 60/120Hz ripple would beat with the 48Hz shutter frequency. I don't think this can happen with digital projection.
I would inspect the lamp and see if the tips are weird, should be a large blunt one and a thin pointy one - with only very minor growths. Sometimes rotating a lamp with horns will steady the arc for a while.

[Steve Guttag]

Doremi/Dolby OS drives ALL will fail. It is their nature. The bad batch of IMS3000 ones were particularly short lived. Honestly, I don't know why the even use those SSDs. I'd scrap that, run a cable to the front panel with another USB slot and a cover. Get a stubby USB drive (The kind that barely stick out at all) and just run from a USB stick. It's bound to last as long and is immediately replaceable without removing the server.

As to the SR-1000 freezing...I suspect there is more to that story or I would have seen it myself. I wonder what storage you are using with it. Seriously, I've been using it for many years now (pre-C19) and they're still going. Give it another shot. The SR-1000 does have a web hosting thing where you can use a tablet or cell phone for its UI. The VGA port thing is long-past now. You might fault them for dropping it but it is gone from every other server too. Dolby allows you to put in a Bluetooth dongle but the SR1000 is already onboard. Plus, having a phone/tablet is already likely a solution for a local UI.

I do wish the SR-1000 had another NIC, however. I don't want to combine either media or management with Atmos streaming.

[Stefan Scholz]

Also not a fan of the SX 3000 and 4000.

I had few issues with SR 1000s, like Steve pointed out. Mostly the delicate SATA cable to the Enterprise Storage, after replacing with a simple aftermarket cable, problems vanished.
Plus the internal flat CAT cable, that had bad contacts on a few units, and then triggers a security manager alert. Replacing them helped. The OEM ones seemed to have an oily coat, which eventually led to bad contact
Yes, some, or many are damn slow to boot, but the one I use, includes IAB decoding, and most licenses, is pretty fast in comparison to the rest. So there are not only at least 2 different lines of Firmware, but also different power in the Rapsberry, or a newer model. I am using a standard NAS and it offers 74 TB of movie storage, which is unneeded in commercial operations, but nice to have in my screening setup.
Just a third Network Interface for IAB stream would be fine.

IMS 3000 is actually pretty old these days, for a computer product. Sold like around 8 years. I have a few problems with it. Some do not synchronize with NTP, even though set correctly like in the other setups in the same house. Combine it with a pretty bad clock stability, at some point you run out of correction allowance, and need a digital rights key to correct.
The choice of SSD, which aren't reliable in some batches. Using different ones, which, at the current situation, are difficult to trace, if not impossible. Even Dolby can't supply spares, and seem to have difficulties to maintain the production ones. You can still opt for the NAS though.
IMS 3k is not a bad choice in general, I just personally prefer GDC 1k. And I do prefer the GDC GUI over Dolby.

[Caleb Williams]

Doremi/Dolby OS drives ALL will fail. It is their nature. The bad batch of IMS3000 ones were particularly short lived. Honestly, I don't know why the even use those SSDs. I'd scrap that, run a cable to the front panel with another USB slot and a cover. Get a stubby USB drive (The kind that barely stick out at all) and just run from a USB stick. It's bound to last as long and is immediately replaceable without removing the server.

Having had too much personal experience with this I completely agree. However, the new manufacturer they're using (Swissbit) seems to put out a lot higher quality stuff. The previous ssd's literally were the same memory chip as you'd find in a cheap thumb drive. We have not had any premature failures of the Swissbit modules. You can find a usb2.0 header to usb A adapter pretty cheap on Amazon (link attached) if you want to do that mod, although you might have to modify the faceplate if you want to avoid taking the server out of the projector to replace the usb. With a USB adapter that opens up all kinds of other unsupported storage types you could try like sata or nvme.

We tried to source Swissbit or similar ssd's to replace our spare stock last month, and the market has been absolutely obliterated. None were available for cheaper than Dolby offers the replacement SSD. Hopefully that will change in the future.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I'm not sure what we got with our latest SSD replacement. Dolby told us that they switched to proper SSDs with a real SSD controller instead of a cheap flash drive. Then again, the USB-disk emergency boot works pretty well. Like Steve indicated, you could essentially run your production off of there. I'm not sure if the USB drive is a limiting factor in loading speed though. But the IMS3000 never was a quick booter and once the web interface has been used a bit, most stuff seems to operate from memory and not from disk.

Still, I'd consider the IMS3000 to be one of the more mature products out there at the moment. We've also a Barco ICMP and while the current software iterations are mostly stable, we had quite a few issues over the years. The most problematic was getting Atmos to work reliably.

[Caleb Williams]

I'm not sure if the USB drive is a limiting factor in loading speed though. But the IMS3000 never was a quick booter and once the web interface has been used a bit, most stuff seems to operate from memory and not from disk.

I blame DCI for slow boot times. The server has to do quite a bit of extra stuff compaired to normal enterprise equipment just to get to a usable state. Combine that with very average hardware specs and you get the slow result.

Interestingly, If you have a fast-ish thumb drive and make sure it's plugged into a usb 3.0 port, I've notice that the server does boot and perform faster than the original stock eUSB. However, if you leave the consumer drive in there for too long you'll run into the same issues with corruption (on a lot shorter time-scale). Consumer drives also don't have very big storage buffers, so continuous usage can cause slowdowns. During a previous supply shortage we were forced to operate an IMS2000 via usb for about 3 months. Because I was curious, I re-provisioned that usb after it was pulled from the server and tried to boot a server on the bench with it. By that point it was so slow that the playlist loading timed out and the server was essentially non-functional. Even just file transfers to/from that drive were excruciatingly slow.

If you want to operate for a long period like that I'd still recommend using a usb style ssd or ssd->usb adapter of some sort.