Posted by Andrew Maddison on 10/11/05 15:40

On Tue, 11 Oct 2005, Ben wrote:

> The film stock that studios posses certainly has very much higher
> resolution than current HDTV standards, but the projected image that you
> see in a typical cinema is probably about the same or even poorer than
> HDTV resolution. Kodak did a study into this in the early days of
> digital projection and found that some cinemas were equivalent to only
> 900 horizontal pixels (approximately PAL quality) while the average was
> iirc in the region 1500 or so. Basically the current generation of 2k
> digital cinema projectors (2048 horizontal pixels) should look better
> than what most cinemas are currently showing, and the next generation 4k
> projectors even better still.

The disadvantages of film (dust, scratching, etc) are removed by the use
of digital projection technology. However the human eye doesn't "like"
the image of a digital cinema projector as much as conventionally shot
film. Film grain actually causes the eye to think the image is a *higher*
resolution than a perfectly clean, grain-free image - our brain is
designed to blank out static portions of the picture we're seeing (in
order that we might hunt better) but this has the side-effect of us
finding cleanly projected digital cinema images more fatiguing than
old-fashioned film.

I'm not arguing that film is a better resolution than d-cinema, but that
it's perceptually more pleasing to the eye. A lot of companies involved
in digital cinema are investing money in designing systems to insert
film-like grain at the projection stage (not before as grain is by
definition very difficult to compress) to make the audience like the
picture more.

Andrew

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---------------------------- Andrew Maddison ----------------------------
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