Barco HDR laser projection with Dolby Atmos Vue "Epic" PLF offering,

[Jonathan Smiles]

Vue International chain is committing to 60 "Epic" screens installed by the end of 2027 in the UK and mainland Europe.

Has anyone here been able to compare the same content in Dolby Cinema and Barco HDR versions?

Previous thread on Barco LS4K HDR projector - https://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/...841-barco-ls4k

Sources:
Variety https://variety.com/2025/film/global...ax-1236450143/
Barco press release https://www.barco.com/en/about/press...-for-hdr-by-ba
HDR by Barco https://www.barco.com/en/solutions/cinema/hdr-by-barco
HDR by Barco Post-Production https://www.barco.com/en/inspiration...ion-solutions-

[James Gardiner]

I did a video presentation on the LS4K a while ago. I posted a YouTube video on it. Look up my channel.

The inky blacks of Dolby are cool, but the 300 over 100nit peak luminance of Barco are great.
The Barco, using the new TI-DMD, and hi contrast lenses, can get very good blacks too.
So.. considering, you have to really build a cinema like a dark hole to get the Dolby blacks to be most noticeable, and most cinemas are not built that way and are not experiential to sit in so a higher peak luminance has more impact. I think the Barco has a good market. DCI selected 300 nits over 100 nts for a reason. It looked worth the effort to push the industry to that position. (Although being really technically difficult).

They will both have a market, but the 300nit probably is more suited to how general cinemas are build in terms of return on investment in regard to lift in picture quality for the cinema already build.
But I expect it is very subjective.

[Jonathan Smiles]

Found your YouTube channel.

Interesting Barco have Joachim Zell AKA JZ as head of HDR Content Workflow, it shows Barco are serious with providing Post Production grading and mastering support that Dolby and IMAX provide.

[Leo Enticknap]

I recently saw a launch webinar for the the SP4K-P and their color grading for HDR assistance device (sorry - forgotten the name of it), at which they gave the impression that they are serious about trying to move into the post-production technology market on a more organized and consistent basis than when their presence was just with the Series 2 -P projector.

[Stefan Scholz]

VUE is not known for high standards, at least here in Berlin or northern Germany. They are more known for the worst standard in the industry.
Good to hear the change, but do I trust them?
But that is not the subject here. 100 candles is a great standard brightness for standard DCPs, the level that was standard with 70 mm initially.
300 candles is even more towards a better target.
the problem with super blacks is the reality. A room can be made matt black, walls, seats, rugs, etc. You may minimise the porthole and use anti reflex glass. Sill, in venues I know they use overly bright exit lights that ruin everything, also in minimum dimmed position, wrong hardware choice.
They do not offer powder rooms for patrons to powder the faces matt. greasy Faces re reflect and ruin all contrast efforts.
300 cd has an advantage, it's bright, and very good standard contrast will do, which will also be limited by re reflection. I am curious to see results.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Vue is like your local McDonald's. Your average thoroughfare and your experience may vary, depending on the amount of fucks given by local management.

Dolby Cinema's black levels, when correctly calibrated, are pretty good, but are often ruined by excessive lightning in the room. I've seen other projection technology get close, but never really cut it to the same levels.

IMHO, the future will be direct-view LED screens for "PLF", no current projector technology can compete against that, period.

Like Stefan already indicated, most efforts for extreme blacks and high contrast are being ruined by Emergency Exit signs and aisle lightning bouncing off the screen. People's greasy faces are only an issue if actually anybody shows up.

[James Gardiner]

Your dreamin (Australian vernacular for) very unlikely. Emissive displays are super expensive, compared to projectors of the same size screen. (Mainly because the hardware is 5-10 times as much/size as is needed for a projector) They eat 3xPlus in power, weigh so much you have to spend heaps on reinforcement of the building. Current cinemas are simply not designed to have such heavy kit in them. The Audio is a major compromise.

But yes, 0 nits to 300 nits. no compromise does look nice. Unfortunately, it's not very commercial. And in this era of compressed attendance levels, higher ticket prices to make this make sense, is going to make attendance fall off even more.

I cannot see it happening, unless it's for a purpose built experiences where ambient light is needed, such as dine in experience type offerings.

[Marcel Birgelen]

There aren't that many DCI compliant LED screens out there right now, but Samsung has been delivering one for a while now. Their mid-size offering also has the total weight of the screen in the specifications. I'm not sure why they don't list the other ones, but I guess the main reason is lack of availability.

A 10.2m x 5.4m screen would come in at 1,363 kg, according to their specifications. The specifications don't say if this includes stuff like strutting and cabling. But let's be generous and say this adds another 50% to the total weight, which would then be around 2,000 kg or about 2 tonnes in both metric and long tons... While this is something you need to account for, I don't think that really yields a large challenge in most constructions. Even the floor in our screening room could easily handle such an extra load, for example.

As for costs, the retail price is roughly $3300 per module, which would bring the cost for the entire screen to about $320k. (again, retail price, which is unlikely to be the final price) That price probably doesn't include installation and peripherals, but is about in the same range as a high-end dual laser projector installation.

As for power consumption, this is quoted as max. 6.4 kW at 300 nits and 4 kW at 42 nits. Now, it's hard to predict what the exact power consumption will be, as no movie will have all the pixels at 300 nits all the time, but those numbers aren't shocking, compared to what a dual xenon setup would cost in power budget and xenon and laser don't get "Watts off for good behavior", as their light engines are running at "maximum power" all the time, no matter how much light ends up on the screen.

So, yeah, while those screens are still way to expensive for your average cinema screen, I'm not so sure if they are too expensive for a PLF-type screen. While the specifications above are for a relatively modest screen, prices for large-scale LED screens have come down significantly in the last 10 or so years. With more competition, primarily from Chinese manufacturers, I'm curious when we see the first large-scale breakthrough of this technology.

[James Gardiner]

timewaying specs can be found at https://timewaying.com/heyled-cinema-screen/
for 10 to 22 m screens
1430kg (10m) to 5980kg (22m)
10m screen at $3200 compared to a $50 modern laster projector for the same size screen.
A Samsung 10+ meter screen was installed into a local cinema. They had to reenforce the building to have it safely installed under our building regulations.
That's for a entry level type screen. Its not just how much it weights, but the fact it has a small footprint for the weight.

This technology has its place, but do not expect it to displace projectors. Commercially i don't see it being in a position to do that.

Also, I feel the cost savings have mostly been absorbed but the outdoor signage market already. I don't see it going down much more.
Just consider the amount of material metal etc that goes into building a Projector over a massive screen. This predicates the cost difference.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Yeah, it will probably not replace the screen and projector in your local neighborhood cinema, but if you look at the cost of current PLF installs, then those numbers don't seem to be that far off.

Keep in mind that this $50k laser projector can't really be compared to the "PLF" style projectors, which easily cost a factor 3 to 5 more for a single unit, especially if you want to have the latest and greatest in contrast. While it's now 10 years ago, Dolby spent up to $1M on every projector installation into their early Dolby Cinema rollouts. IMAX supposedly estimates their projector install to be around $500k per install.

Those projectors also aren't the lightest ones and your booth needs to be able to handle them. The latest IMAX laser projection setup is estimated to be about 1.8 tons per projector.

Looking at the "Direct View alternative", I'd say that 6 tonnes for a huge, 22m screen, aren't all that bad. If you're retrofitting an existing installation, some reinforcements are probably going to be necessary. But for new builds, while you still need some kind of equipment room, you don't need a booth with heavy and expensive equipment that requires constant cooling and ventilation up there. The money not spent on booth construction could be used for increasing easy access for equipment like a cherry-picker for example.

As for further development in LED technology: You see that the trend for bigger TVs still seems to continue. Microled displays are slowly making their inroads and LED panel displays keep turning up in ever more spaces. While development will eventually slow down, I'm not yet seeing the signs for it. Despite a lot of stuff only getting more expensive, I've seen a consistent drop in LED panel pricing, pixel pitches are coming down and modules are getting more efficient year after year.

Material-wise: Yes, a LED screen will probably always need more resources than a classical cinema screen, but there are continued efforts to make those screens as light-weight as possible, Plus, you obviously save material on the projector(s). While not really comparable, it's a factor in the total sum.

[Steve Guttag]

It will be interesting to track the price. Compared to when we first started looking into emissive screens, the price seems to be nearly ½ of where it was 5-6 years ago. If, in another 5-6 years, it drops like that again, you are really looking at near parity for some form of HDR versus imissive. You have also completely eliminated all forms of the second floor of the theatre, except for storage or office space. In 10-15 years, I could see emissive screens being lower cost than their projection counterparts.

Another thing history has taught us...being an early adopter of technology tends to get you the least technology for the most expense.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Yeah I agree the costs to retrofit versus the costs to put in when doing a ground-up building are two completely unique costs... and ground-up will see Emissive as a competitive option first due to it entirely changing what is required with power and architectural fit-out like Steve suggests.

[Jim Cassedy]

As y'all know from the previous post about this subject, I've been working with a BARCO
LS4K-HDR here since January of this year. Without a way to do a direct Dolby vs Barco
test on the same screen, and under similar lighting conditions which one is better is going
to be somewhat subjective for me. Keep in mind that I've worked at Dolby's HQ screening
room here in SF, which is probably one of the best auditoriums on the planet, and I I think
the picture here, if the lighting conditions were the same, is pretty darn close to what they've
got. I don't think the general public could tell them apart, and, quite frankly, without taking
actual measurements or looking at a test chart, I probably couldn't tell them apart myself.

My only complaint right now, as I've mentioned in a previous post, is that, while the LS4K
HDR is great if all you are going to do is run 'standard' shows from a DCP playlist, It is
for now, NOT designed to cleanly and rapidly intermix DCP and ALT (HDMI) content
sources. First of all, the minute you select an HDMI input, your DCP playback gets
disabled. In fact, if you run some HDMI content, and forget to switch it back to one
of the DCP inputs manually afterwards, scheduled shows will not start. Also, at this
time, when you switch between HDMI and DCP inputs, you also have to also manually
switch colorspace settings. For some reason, at this time, it's not possible to assign
the colorspace parameters to a source input macro. To be fair, I have been told that
this is a known issue and that 'they're working on it'. Given the fact that we do a lot
of live hosted events and Q&A's here, this is a bit of a pain-in-the-backside for me,
since I can't switch a show a cleanly or as rapidly as I'd like. (It can take as much as
30 seconds to switch inputs and make the colorspae change, and that's a long time
to leave customers sitting in the dark) I have faith that they'll work this out soon, but
except for this one technical issue, I really like the projector.

Also, although it was always possible to keep the booth here at a comfortable
temperature, the LS4K-HDR puts out practically no extra heat. Even after operating
all day, you can put your hand on top of the power supply or projector, and they're
barely above room temperature. We've been able to cut back on the air conditioning
a bit because of this. Now the only time I have to turn the AC up to full blast is when
we're running 35 or 70mm

[Ryan Gallagher]

As y'all know from the previous post about this subject, I've been working with a BARCO
LS4K-HDR here since January of this year. Without a way to do a direct Dolby vs Barco
test on the same screen, and under similar lighting conditions which one is better is going
to be somewhat subjective for me. Keep in mind that I've worked at Dolby's HQ screening
room here in SF, which is probably one of the best auditoriums on the planet, and I I think
the picture here, if the lighting conditions were the same, is pretty darn close to what they've
got. I don't think the general public could tell them apart, and, quite frankly, without taking
actual measurements or looking at a test chart, I probably couldn't tell them apart myself.

My only complaint right now, as I've mentioned in a previous post, is that, while the LS4K
HDR is great if all you are going to do is run 'standard' shows from a DCP playlist, It is
for now, NOT designed to cleanly and rapidly intermix DCP and ALT (HDMI) content
sources. First of all, the minute you select an HDMI input, your DCP playback gets
disabled. In fact, if you run some HDMI content, and forget to switch it back to one
of the DCP inputs manually afterwards, scheduled shows will not start. Also, at this
time, when you switch between HDMI and DCP inputs, you also have to also manually
switch colorspace settings. For some reason, at this time, it's not possible to assign
the colorspace parameters to a source input macro. To be fair, I have been told that
this is a known issue and that 'they're working on it'. Given the fact that we do a lot
of live hosted events and Q&A's here, this is a bit of a pain-in-the-backside for me,
since I can't switch a show a cleanly or as rapidly as I'd like. (It can take as much as
30 seconds to switch inputs and make the colorspae change, and that's a long time
to leave customers sitting in the dark) I have faith that they'll work this out soon, but
except for this one technical issue, I really like the projector.

Also, although it was always possible to keep the booth here at a comfortable
temperature, the LS4K-HDR puts out practically no extra heat. Even after operating
all day, you can put your hand on top of the power supply or projector, and they're
barely above room temperature. We've been able to cut back on the air conditioning
a bit because of this. Now the only time I have to turn the AC up to full blast is when
we're running 35 or 70mm

I hope they fix those issues for you. Those reconfigure times are insane in a live context. Obviously if you can make all your ALT content into DCPs that is a route, but not always possible with all content and time available. For a very live venue that is the kind of timing that will make one consider adding a second ALT only projector back into the booth... akin to IMAX's pre-roll projectors often found mounted near the port glass etc. A bit silly in a 4K HDR DCI room!

Our venue maintains a small 8k lumen balcony projector (though it is overdue for an update to a brighter unit) for our smaller live events flown screen. I'd be tempted to re-lens it and use it for ALT sources on the big screen too if I was stuck with your experience of source switching constraints. But only a suitable approach for pre-roll no one cares about, if it is something people care about, or an ALT input festival film, the small projector ain't gonna cut it.

[Pietro Clarici]

(...) you don't need a booth with heavy and expensive equipment that requires constant cooling and ventilation up there

Has anyone quantified the amount of heat emitted by a LED wall (especially when running HDR content) and the impact that it has on the auditorium's thermal performance?
Paradoxically it could even be beneficial during winter if there's enough ventilation to redistribute it, but summer shows could necessitate major redesigns of HVAC systems.