Are deeply curved LED screens the way to the future for cinema?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Frank, yes they did. I have one of them.here. it's a large very heavy lens. > 20 pounds!

[Frank Angel]

I believe that Dimension 150 process had a corrective lens that did to a standard image what that "rectified" print process did for the Todd-AO release prints, i.e., correct for the screen curvature and eliminate the bowing horizon distortion. UA Theatres had a Dimension 150 theatre out in Syosset NY. While their curved screen was probably at least 80ft width, the curve was not nearly as severe as Cinerama. It was a mild curve and coupled with the D150 Curvelux corrective lens (not 100% sure if that is the right name for it), it rendered even standard 70mm release prints and even 35mm/flat and scope prints on the curved screen almost distortion-free. Our whole theatre crew would hop in the car to drive out there from Brooklyn -- a good hour trek on the Long Island Distressway -- just to watch a movie in that beautiful theatre. It was a marvelous place to see any movie on a curved screen -- sound system was impressive as well.

When every large theatre on the planet in those days was being chopped and tortured into minuscule shoebox multiplexes, I was grateful that the UA D150 was still standing and operational, but I wondered how that was even possible. I asked the projectionist, how did UA not multiplex this beautiful 1000 seater into, you know...a dozen or more living-room size "cinemas"? He said it was because UA had a headquarters in Syosset (or near by) and the execs wanted to have a prestige, impressive showplace to bring their friends and family for private screenings. Eventually even that bit of snobbery wasn't enough to be able to stave off the inevitable wrecking ball.
UA D150.jpg

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Mark, You can see the balcony booth Todd had built on Page two. Originally, the Cinestage had a solid sheet. But when another company took it over in the mid 1960's, they signed a deal to equip it for 70mm cinerama. Hence, the strip screen... The only thing of intrest in.the balcony booth was a 70mm Todd-AO cement splicer that was found by a friend. Oh, you can also see the back of the X-Rated screen and speaker stands...

[Mark Ogden]

Those old B&W pictures show the old booth. Todd constructed a new booth at the front of the balcony as you can see in the previous images, I assume mainly to eliminate keystone, but also because that old booth probably could not take the weight of two DP-70's safely. They had the same issue in the Michael Todd Theater where they constructed a booth in the rear on the main floor and even installed Century JJ's instead because that booth was really cramped. Chicago actually had two other Cinerama theaters. Both of those both started out as 3-Strip and then went to Single strip 70mm as well. Here are a few more pictures..

AS I recall, Todd had the same specification for Todd-AO that Cinerama had: the projectors had to be as close to center axis as possible, which is why there are many mid-century theaters that saw a shift to rear-of-the-mezzanine booths. Where it was NOT possible, you could obtain a so-called "rectified" print of the picture (like Oklahoma!) that in a half-assed way tried to correct for the keystoning on a curved screen, but that was considered sub-optimal.

70mm-Todd-AO_rectified-no_cc.jpeg

[Bobby Henderson]

We've actually been looking at options for a LED screen in our screening room for quite a while now. It was back in 2018 that I started to gather some offers from several potential suppliers. Right now, nobody is providing LED screens that fit the purpose and are also DCI compliant. With the current inflation and general supply shortage, predictions of how a price will evolve have to be taken with a grain of salt or two, but from what I've seen over the years is that with current LED screen technology, the price tends to halve about every two to two-and-a-half years or so...

The supply chain problem is bad enough for my company that we're having to quote LED displays from other manufacturers. We prefer using Daktronics for LED-based variable message signs and billboards. But we're looking at delivery times as long as six months. I drew up a couple projects this week with LED displays from Watchfire; they're promising faster delivery times. But the cost is quite a bit higher. A sign company would be playing Russian roulette if trying to quote some off-brand "OEM" type of LED board. There's no telling when you would get the display. And then there's the matter of likely far lower quality and product longevity.

A LED-based cinema screen would have to be extremely reliable and have an acceptably long product life. The display would also need to be designed in a manner where maintenance and repairs could be fast/easy to minimize down time.

LED-based signs, billboards, etc have improved a lot over the past 20 years. The first full color units didn't have great color quality and the refresh rates were low, 30Hz or 60Hz. Today the color quality is far better, the displays can be very bright to compete with ambient sunlight and the refresh rates are extremely fast (anywhere from 400Hz to over 2000Hz depending on the make and model). The cost per pixel has fallen a great deal. In the early 2000's it was common for LED signs to have very coarse, low resolutions. A 35mm pitch from pixel to pixel was common. Around 10 or so years ago prices dropped enough to make 20mm pitch boards more popular. Then 16mm boards became more accessible. Now more customers are starting to buy 10mm pitch displays. Higher resolution boards in 8mm, 6mm or even 4mm pitches are available for outdoor installs, but those cost shit-ton for a display in a properly large size. Hopefully as time goes on the prices for the higher resolution boards will fall. Companies like Daktronics have been phasing out the lowest, most coarse resolution product lines.

Those price drops could correspond to making LED-based cinema screens more practical in terms of cost. Still, a LED display manufacturer such as Samsung, Daktronics, etc would need to develop a product line specific to cinemas. I imagine there could some market bleed-over into other businesses that need large, indoor LED displays. A large screen with speakers installed directly behind it is a pretty specific application.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

It certainly is a sad sight to see this theater in this stage of disrepair, but it clearly indicates that it takes some people with vision and the guts to execute to keep places like this relevant and open. Once the visionary disapears, the ship seems to be heading towards the next iceburg

Both were demolished but the facade's were saved for the new live theaters. It actually looks very nice now.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Those old B&W pictures show the old booth. Todd constructed a new booth at the front of the balcony as you can see in the previous images, I assume mainly to eliminate keystone, but also because that old booth probably could not take the weight of two DP-70's safely. They had the same issue in the Michael Todd Theater where they constructed a booth in the rear on the main floor and even installed Century JJ's instead because that booth was really cramped. Chicago actually had two other Cinerama theaters. Both of those both started out as 3-Strip and then went to Single strip 70mm as well. Here are a few more pictures..

It certainly is a sad sight to see this theater in this stage of disrepair, but it clearly indicates that it takes some people with vision and the guts to execute to keep places like this relevant and open. Once the visionary disapears, the ship seems to be heading towards the next iceberg...

And by the way, everybody, I need to get this out in the open. Please hear me out because it's really bothering me. This misuse of the term "hacker" as a synonym for "pirate" has simply got to stop. As an hacker I find it an affront that you guys are blanket defaming computer scientists, security experts, engineers, programmers and such by comparing them to criminals for no real reason. Yes, I realise you're all just going on what the right-wing owned commercial mass media and Crappipedia have misled you to believe for so many years. It was wrong in the '90s and it's still wrong now.

Remember, when you defame hackers, you're defaming entire groups of people who have worked (some even devoted their lives) to bring the computer and networking technologies you take for granted every single day into existance. Not cool.

The term "hacker" is used for many purposes and I have since stopped bothering about it, except if the local sciptkiddie who has discovered the latest DDoS tool is called "a hacker".

The line between hackers and pirates is sometimes pretty thin, because it requires some extraordinary hacking skills to get rid of many of the copy-protection schemes that have been employed over the years. Even back in the 90s there was sometimes hard to tell where the world of the release groups stopped and that of e.g. the demo scene started...

The cost (or cost per pixel) is still too high for LED-based screens to achieve mainstream use in cinemas. The expectation is to have a display that sports at least 2K native resolution, if not 4K. Doing that is really expensive.

Keep in mind that a laser projector with a 10 year warranty on the light source also isn't all that cheap and also needs a replacement every 10-or-so years. Also, this technology will replace your screen too, which may cost a fraction of the projector, but is a cost factor too.

We've actually been looking at options for a LED screen in our screening room for quite a while now. It was back in 2018 that I started to gather some offers from several potential supiers. Right now, nobody is providing LED screens that fit the purpose and are also DCI compliant. With the current inflation and general supply shortage, predictions of how a price will evolve have to be taken with a grain of salt or two, but from what I've seen over the years is that with current LED screen technology, the price tends to halve about every two to two-and-a-half years or so...

[Van Dalton]

There is an easier and cheaper way to recover the content: Simply play it on any decent record player the only challenge will be fitting a 16" record on there, but I've got an old German-built record player that could fit oversized records. although I've never seen them.

Load the recording into your favorite sound editing utility, reverse it and if you recorded it at 45 RPM, you slow it down by factor 0,75 and voila... no expensive gear needed. As I said so, you could do this even on the commandline with a tool like ffmpeg.

Lately I've been playing around with AEI Music's (lor AEI Rediffusion in the UK) "Propac 4" cassette format, an strange 4-track mono format running at (nominally, anyways.....) 1 2/5 in/s. All that needs be done is both sides of the cassette be played into Audacity at 1 7/8" on your stereo Technics RS-AZ6/7 or Nak, slow the files down 25% (though most I've done seem to need an additional 2% more) and split them into 4 individual mono tracks.

Then if you want to actually record your own tapes in the format you'd just do all that in reverse and speed it up 33 1/3%. Gee, where have I seen that number before?

About a grand (after shipping and California sales tax) would buy me this, which I could modify to play such a record in 2-3 hours. Although this is no longer in production, used examples appear on Ebay quite frequently. It would be an even easier option, because it can do 60 RPM out of the box. I have the turntable it is a modification of (the Vestax BDT-2500), and the variable speed function is great for digitizing records dating from the 1890s to the period between roughly 1912 to 1925, when 78.16 RPM (60 Hz territories) and 77.92 RPM (50 Hz) became established as the universal standard.

Of course if you wanted to do it the hard way, you'd just have to get hold of an old right-hand drive radio transcription table, play with the speed adjustment and remount the cartridge *backwards* in the headshell. Problem solved. If it's a vertical hill-and-dale disc (like old Muzak transcriptions and virtually all records before the late 1920s or early 1930s were) then you rewire the stereo cartridge out-of-phase.

Well, I mean, AMI Rowe did do the left-hand drive thing in their 45 RPM jukeboxes back in the 1970s and 80s, which played standard clockways-rotating discs, and that was how they did it, so.....

And by the way, everybody, I need to get this out in the open. Please hear me out because it's really bothering me. This misuse of the term "hacker" as a synonym for "pirate" has simply got to stop. As an hacker I find it an affront that you guys are blanket defaming computer scientists, security experts, engineers, programmers and such by comparing them to criminals for no real reason. Yes, I realise you're all just going on what the right-wing owned commercial mass media and Crappipedia have misled you to believe for so many years. It was wrong in the '90s and it's still wrong now.

Remember, when you defame hackers, you're defaming entire groups of people who have worked (some even devoted their lives) to bring the computer and networking technologies you take for granted every single day into existance. Not cool.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Those old B&W pictures show the old booth. Todd constructed a new booth at the front of the balcony as you can see in the previous images, I assume mainly to eliminate keystone, but also because that old booth probably could not take the weight of two DP-70's safely. They had the same issue in the Michael Todd Theater where they constructed a booth in the rear on the main floor and even installed Century JJ's instead because that booth was really cramped. Chicago actually had two other Cinerama theaters. Both of those both started out as 3-Strip and then went to Single strip 70mm as well. Here are a few more pictures..

[Allan Young]

That's hard to say. The Todd AO theater was right next door to this one and it had a flat solid sheet screen, and Century JJ's in a cramped main floor booth under the mezzanine. The Michael Todd theater and The Cinestage were literally right next to each other. So close that the lobbies connected.

Cinestage did open first, about a year before the Todd did. Sometime in the late1960's, Cinestage became a single strip 70mm Cinerama theater. I always assumed this screen was from those days.

Okay, makes sense now. When you said that Mike Todd used it as a "test laboratory" I assumed he'd installed the strip screen for Todd-AO.

I found this site https://incinerama.com/cinestage.htm, which has photos of the Cinestage screen from 1960 and it appears solid. Looks like Cinerama was installed in 1964 after it was taken over by an outfit called Cinedome Theaters.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

That's hard to say. The Todd AO theater was right next door to this one and it had a flat solid sheet screen, and Century JJ's in a cramped main floor booth under the mezzanine. The Michael Todd theater and The Cinestage were literally right next to each other. So close that the lobbies connected.

Cinestage did open first, about a year before the Todd did. Sometime in the late1960's, Cinestage became a single strip 70mm Cinerama theater. I always assumed this screen was from those days. It may have been installed for 2001 A Space Oddyssey. However, once Todd passed away, the theaters ran what ever 70mm film they could book. I watched a lot of movies at both and later was invited in to look at saving the Cinestage screen for a customer planning a new build. But the screen really wasn't worth saving. At that time I could not venture into the Michael Todd because the ceiling had collapsed. But Cinestage was still in pretty good shape. Both buildiings were demolished, but the facades were saved for the new live theaters built behind them. M&R Theaters attempted to reopen and operate them, but it did not pan out so well and they closed down permanently until they were demolished. I'll post more pictures in a while.

[Allan Young]

Take the old CInestage Theater in Chicago... It had an actual real Cinerama Strip Screen and DP-70's with Super Cinex's on them, even though it was not technically a Cinerama Theater. Mike Todd owned it and used it as his test laboratory.

First I've heard that Todd-AO used a strip screen at one point. From the look of things in the photo it had the lower curvature of the solid Todd-AO screens. Presumably this was the first and only Todd-AO theater to have one?

[Carsten Kurz]

Currently, there are 5 DCI compliant LED screens, two from Korea (Samsung/LG), two from China (AET Altai/SHENZHEN TIMEWAYING TECHNOLOGY), one from Japan (Sony).
As far as I know, sales numbers are low, except maybe for the two chinese ones on china mainland, and probably Korea for Samsung and LG.
When Sony stopped making DCI projectors in 2020, they probably also gave up their DCI CLEDIS plans.

[Bobby Henderson]

This topic is getting revisited? I don't think much has changed since the last time the topic was discussed.

I really like LED "jumbotron" technology for signs, billboards and other types of specialty displays -like all those "spectaculars" in Times Square. There are still key stumbling blocks for the technology to make serious inroads into commercial cinemas.

The cost (or cost per pixel) is still too high for LED-based screens to achieve mainstream use in cinemas. The expectation is to have a display that sports at least 2K native resolution, if not 4K. Doing that is really expensive. Combine that with the overall life span of the product (maybe 10 years) and its ongoing maintenance needs. Individual tiles have to be replaced from time to time due to stuck pixels or other issues. Then you have to carefully balance the color/contrast of the replacement tiles with the rest of the existing screen. Otherwise you end up with a "quilted" appearance.

In order to push the cost down to more realistic levels I think it would take one or more large cinema chains committing to large volume orders. We're talking at least hundreds if not thousands of screens so there can be some cost benefit due to scale. It would also require limits on the number of product models, mainly the LED tiles. You get only so many resolution choices in which to build up a screen.

Audio is still a serious problem. None of the major LED jumbotron companies (Daktronics, Watchfire, Samsung, etc) are incorporating audio into their boards. That's because pretty much all their products are sold with no need for audio within the display. Signs and billboards don't need audio. That's the vast majority of the market there. Those companies would have to develop a new kind of LED tile for cinemas that can allow speakers installed behind it to pass audio through it. The tile would have to allow that without ruining the black levels in the image. The MSG Sphere project in Las Vegas ($1.8 billion) is the only LED-based installation I know of that will somehow have audio emitting from its enormous indoor dome screen.

I saw some comments saying content would have to be custom authored for these screens. That doesn't have to be the case if the boards are hitting native 2048x1080 or 4096x2160 resolution. The controllers can accommodate standards like HDMI. It shouldn't be a big deal to make such displays DCI compliant. I don't know if Samsung's Onyx product (for the handful of cinemas that use it) is DCI compliant.

Lately, thanks to COVID-19 and other global problems, it can be a real pain in the ass to order a new outdoor sign. You make the sale and place the order. Then expect to wait months for the product to be delivered.

If LED-based displays can break into the commercial cinema market in any kind of big way there would be a lot of interesting potential. For instance, the displays are bright enough that one could operate a drive-in theater with a LED-based screen and have shows during the day.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Thing here is, THE CONTENT needs to be considered -- the authors are creating content specifically to fit on that screen. with the story being nothing but a vehicle for the action....what would a hacker gain in being able to grab that cinematography....play it on an iphone? A tablet? even a 89in TV? The whole point of the work itself is the screen, not the story. Probably that's reason no one hacked Cinerama in its short heyday. Futurovision is not going to lose any significant ticket sales because someone bought a hacked DVD of it on a street-corner.

Content Schmomtent! If it sells tickets that's all the top brass is interested. Take the old CInestage Theater in Chicago... It had an actual real Cinerama Strip Screen and DP-70's with Super Cinex's on them, even though it was not technically a Cinerama Theater. Mike Todd owned it and used it as his test laboratory, the first Smell-O-Vision machine was still there when the building was gutted in the late 80's. But there was an interim time when the theater was still operating and X-Rated films ran continuously on the Strip Screen and then later on a smaller screen placed in front of the strip screen. Liz Taylor, who inherited the building after Mike died had to pay the taxes somehow... The façade of it and the Michael Todd right next door to it were saved, but entirely new buildings are in back of those facades. We actually tried to salvage the strip screen out of there for reuse in an upcoming new build, but that didn't work out.