Sony Stakes out 4K Projector Territory

After months of hinting that Sony Electronics could leverage its high-end home theater technology into multiplexes, the company’s executives demonstrated a prototype 4K digital cinema projector to the Hollywood community in early June. The new 4K projector is based on the SXRD technology first introduced with Sony’s 2K Qualia 004 projector.

Shige Morikawa, senior general manager of the SR division at Sony’s Atsugi Technology Center in Japan, addressed the gathering of directors, cinematographers and studio and post-production executives by noting that the Sony team was well aware that it was not yet up to speed on picture uniformity, gamma curve, and digital noise. "The brightness and contrast ratio also don’t currently meet our specifications," he continued. But attendees were urged to judge the demonstration as a "progress report."

The demonstration consisted of a range of material, shot in 65mm, 35mm and 16mm, including excerpts from the ASC-DCI SteM (Standard Evaluation Material) footage and side-by-side comparisons between 2K and 4K images. At the end of the demonstration, the assembled golden eyes applauded, giving a conditional thumbs-up to what they’d seen.

Sony’s general manager of digital production systems, Andrew Stucker, said the demonstration afforded a look at two new Sony advances: the 4K imager and JPEG-2000 encoding. The 4K SRX imager, which will tour in an improved form in October and debut for sale in January 2005, features 4096×2160 pixel resolution and a dual 2 kilowatt Xenon lamp system. The current contrast ratio is 1300:1, with an intended goal of 2100:1 (the chip has a 3000:1 contrast ratio). With SXRD technology, pixels are set at a pitch of 8.5 micrometers, from the center of one SXRD pixel to the center of the next, with an inter-pixel gap of 0.35 micrometers.

In January 2005, the 10,000 ANSI lumen SRX-R110 ( $80,000) and the 5,000 ANSI lumen SRX-R105 ( $60,000) will debut. The 5,000-lumen model is recommended for screen widths of up to 25 feet, and the 10,000-lumen model is recommended for screens of up to 40 feet. Morikawa revealed that Sony is at work on a higher-brightness model for larger screens.

Sony also introduced a JPEG-2000 encoder to handle the 26 million pixels per frame inherent in 4K imaging. "You can’t have a 10 TB server in a movie theatre," notes Stucker. "A 4K movie has to be compressed, and JPEG-2000 is the most elegant solution." One advantage of JPEG-2000, which offers real-time encoding, is that it enables multi-image capability. In dual-screen mode, two 1920×1080 images are projected, and in quad-screen mode, four 1920×1080 images are projected. Sony will also offer four optional lenses, with a median price of $15,000.