Posted by Tricky Dicky on 10/11/05 17:17

"Andrew Maddison" <invalid.email.address.see.sig@resbh.co.uk.spam> wrote in
message
news:Pine.SOL.4.44.0510111632230.26912-100000@mimosa.csv.warwick.ac.uk...
> 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.

Amazing. A bit like adding pops & scratches to CDs

Tricky

[Back to original message]