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
4096x2160 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 1920x1080 images are
projected, and in quad-screen mode, four 1920x1080 images are
projected. Sony will also offer four optional lenses, with a median
price of $15,000.
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