Sony Projector For Digital Cinemas

Sony Electronics plans to unveil a new digital projection system for movie theaters, using a microchip it says will advance the industry and threaten rival Texas Instrument's market-leading product.

The move by Sony, a unit of Japan's Sony Corp, comes as the industry appears headed for breakthroughs in establishing technology standards and business models for digital projection systems that can cost $100,000 (£55,000) or more. A few years ago they cost as much as $150,000 (£82,000).

"It seems like everything is coming together at about the right time," said Tom Mykietyn, director of content creation for Sony Electronics.

Digital projection, also called digital cinema, promises better picture quality for audiences, especially with digitally-made movies like current smash hit "Shrek 2."

For Hollywood studios, the systems could also save millions of dollars in annual costs for duplicating and shipping movies because film would be replaced by digital files sent via satellite, the Internet or on DVD-like disks.

But since the start of digital cinema in the late 1990s, industry players have bickered over technology standards and who would pay the bill: theater owners or studios.

Sony, which owns its own Hollywood studio, had looked at designing digital cinema systems early, but backed off until about two years ago, after major studios published initial equipment standards, said Andrew Stucker, general manager of digital production systems for Sony.

Final standards should be unveiled this fall along with formal business plans, the head of the studios' Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) said in March.

"I think (a rollout) is closer than people realize," said Texas Instruments' Doug Darrow. "It's conceivable there could be a significant deployment starting late this year, and by that I mean hundreds of systems scaling to thousands over time."

Currently, there are 95 digital cinema systems in North America and 220 worldwide using the Texas Instruments (TI) "DLP Cinema" technology, Darrow said.

SONY PLANS

Sony wants to change that. In Hollywood on Thursday, it would unveil a prototype of a system it has been so busy preparing it has not even had time to name it, said Stucker.

The new system is designed around Sony's SXRD microchip and promises picture resolution and contrast ratios at a specification known as "4K."

Mykietyn said Sony has leapfrogged TI's "2K" technology, and Sony's system gives filmmakers greater picture resolution and contrast. Stucker said the system meets DCI standards.

Darrow counters that a picture produced by a DLP Cinema system is already far better than film, and that DLP Cinema has proven it is "reliable, robust and secure" in real deployments.

Reliability, he said, was a key factor in reducing total system expenses because it decreased the chance of breakdowns.

Stucker said Sony could be in production in about six months, and the cost would be extremely competitive with the roughly $100,000 for current digital cinema systems.

On the other hand, current DCI standards call for "2K" systems that easily migrate to "4K" technology, and the DLP Cinema systems are designed to do that.

With Texas Instruments planning its own digital cinema presentation in Los Angeles on Friday, observers said the growing competition showed that the market had arrived.

"It's a positive sign that the digital cinema market for products and services is continuing to develop and advance," said DCI chief Chuck Goldwater.

Story source: boston.com.