Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

REDray Projector..

I hear the Thunder calling

I hear the Thunder calling

Jeff Kilgroe said:
(snip) So far everything about UHD is weak sauce. It's essentially a resolution bump and little more.

I'm assuming the projector will get HDMI 2.0. However, it still won't be able to supply the projector to the extent of which its capable, neither will DisplayPort, not unless we use multiple connections and proprietary signaling. Upcoming Falcon Ridge Thunderbolt effectively doubles the available bandwidth on a single TB port. No talk of 8K. There is talk of dual 4K channels on one port though. Thunderbolt may actually take over for DisplayPort moving forward, nothing in the current or proposed DisplayPort specs to facilitate 16bpc full-UHD frame packed 3D, for example, whereas Thunderbolt will be able to handle it later next year and there's a lot of murmurs about the two specs merging officially and to a broader range of products. (snip)
Click to expand...

IMO, rec.2020 color gamut @12bpc at 120fps is where the promise of UHD/4K is fulfilled. Agree with Jeff that the early 4K devices are weak sauce, with the exception of the big $100K+ cinema projectors, which are still limited in terms of where this is going.

I love the idea of merging the TB and DP specs, especially since DP has never really achieved significant penetration. I know its been a slog with TB so far, but I'm ready to leave HDMI, DP, SDI behind. Am I the only one who wants to rewire all my professional and personal AV/computer world with TB and never look back? Dual channel optical TB infrastructure is the only thing I've looked at that might hold up for a decade. (Note: Tactical fiber TB cabling should allow very long runs) Everything else has either a silly price tag, problematic limitations or the functional equivalent of an expiration date way too close to invest in. Just sayin'

Cheers - #19
 
Blair, Jeff does not need defending, he can do it himself. He knows that "so far" the spec includes 2020, and redray does not have to be limited to 709, not that it's part of the uhd standard discussion. So uhd itself is great, not just a resolution bump. Anybody is welcome to debate opinions with me me and acknowledge on fair ground.
 
Stivan Widick said:
Would someone at RED, perhaps Stuart, comment as to whether the following wall paint will work well as a screen for the home REDray Projector? I would like to view both 2D and 3D content in Rec.709 with ~accurate color. I am planning to use something like the Panasonic PT-AE8000U in the meantime.
Click to expand...
You are asking a hypothetical question since only a prototype is all that exists and the projector has been put on the back burner and if and when Red offers a projector for sale they said the commercial high lumens model would come first. The Red prototype uses passive for 3D. That means a screen with a HIGH polarization extinction ratio must be used. The paint company's web cite says a low extinction ratio is required but they incorrectly equate that with preserving polarization when in fact it is the other way around, a high polarization extinction ratio being required to preserve polarization, but what the hell, they are a paint company so what do they know about passive 3D screens? OK I trust their silver paint formulations have a high polarization extinction ratio, and they meant to say high instead of low, as well as high gain. Their non silver paint is for active shutter 3D systems and an even higher gain is specified for that formulation. Unfortunately whenever you go to really high gain screens all sorts of problems exist such as hot spotting and muddling and very long throws are required to reduce those problems. Generally speaking different screens are required to optimize 2D vs 3D, though there are screens that attempt to do both with some compromises in the quality of both 2D and 3D images. For passive it is very difficult but one again long throws beyond what most home theaters have available are required. Now Stewart is a screen company and not a paint company so don't expect them to endorse a DIY painted screen. But I think for 4K, a painted screen is a joke. A bad joke. What do you propose to put the paint on? A piece of sheet rock? Wrong. That isn't smooth but rather is rough textured. Go feel a piece. The plus 8 million pixels need a smooth surface and any coating on such surface must be very uniformly applied. Optical coatings on Stewart screen materials are put on with a very very fine mist if the fabric has an optical coating and most white fabrics are close to unity gain before any coating is applied. Gray screens have a base negative gain and those screens that are gray but have a positive gain have a coating applied, the total gain being the base material's gain times the optical coating gain. For through distances to avoid hot spotting one must use a throw distance no closer than the optical gain times the screen width. I doubt there is a professional here that would use a painted screen. And certainly not for 4K.
http://www.paintonscreen.com/techtalk.html

http://www.paintonscreen.com/3dprojectionscreen.html
 
Last edited:
Peter Proniewicz-Brooks said:
Wayne Morellini said:
Cheap and basic aren't really REDs style
Click to expand...

Actually, I think that coming close to a stated release date is not Red's style. I put off redoing my theater room for over a year to wait for this projector. No more. Since this behavior seems commonplace for this company, they really shouldn't announce release dates for products. It's a dick move.
Click to expand...
 
I agree but many members of the Reduser forum do not seem to be bother by it. Rather than condemn them I think it better to just not rely on either price or delivery preliminaries from them. Coming soon in Red lingo could be six months or several years or maybe never. They are a good company and build great digital movie cameras at good prices. But they haven't learned how to be a consumer HT company or even to realize that those in the film industry might be relying on preliminary dates and prices. If I were in the 4K film business and needed an image of sufficient size to quality control my shooting, editing, and mastering, and that indeed requires a 10ft wide image for 4K, I just could not wait for their 4K projector without my work product suffering. I am just a HT consumer, but I have no regrets in buying my 4K Sony VPL-vw1000ES over a year ago and enjoying upscaled to 4K images instead of wasting a year to see the Red consumer 4K projector be put on the back burner. Redray player is indeed needed by the 4k Red industry professional body and I can understand the 6 month delay so that it and its associated software could be perfected.
 
That means it is probably changing form to a new division ahead of release or dead.
 
Would be hugely useful for Red to advise us if Red Projector is dead, or not. Just say it definitively so we -and everyone else- know, and can move on. I expect many have, since we need to move at the speed of business.
 
I attended the Christie laser projector demo at NAB 2014.
The demo was very informative - for instance, one thing
I learned was why when using polarizing filters on our two
Panasonic 6500 lumen HD projectors for 3D the results were so dim.
It turns out that between the glass in front of the projectors and
the glass in front of the eyes that the transmission is under 10% -
oddly enough, that is what it felt like ~ 600 lumens per eye = yuk.

But back to laser projectors - the salesman kept stating that the lasers are very costly -
he said this at least three times, and their high cost pretty much fixes the retail price.
(The images BTW where STELLAR!)
When asked the cost of a Christie laser projector, we were told, "One order of magnitude higher than Xenon."
That would mean a $10K xenon projector would cost $100K in laser.
Perhaps this is why RED has not been able to deliver it -
the lasers are simply too expensive at this point in time.
NOTE: This is ALL guess work. I hope I am wrong.
 
Jacques. A $2 laser pointer could possibly have a laser that is ten times the cost of a $2 pocket light, but the cost still remain only a portion of the overall cost of less than 33c manufacturing and 66c ex factory.

However, in this case cost of laser is probably significantly more. You aren't pumping a single light source through a color splitting prism, but instead use three separate lasers, so to accommodate these in a design might be over three times the price, might not (guess work here too). If 6 lasers for the best Dolby vision , then you get the picture. However, now that color splitting prism and its spsce is replaced. Now you have to research and design for all the developing safety rules for this sort of laser use. The high powered visible lasers themselves maybe more expensive due to efficiency lacks I'm green and blue, that might no longer cost much more these days. Now you can factor in how much for new parts suppliers (who might be charging a premium, for lasers, not relative to cost basis) and new assembly lines. In these things parenting is a hood way to keep free trade away and competition deliberately down, and dictate the premium price to the public. Now you optionally could factor in your lost revenue in lamp sales other parts and servicing to the extra cost of lasers in the product. Great stuff for marketing. Of course, most of these are fictitious or largely one off costs involved in swapping over to a new technology that gets paid off over time as volume of units are manufactured to pay it off. This is something most theater projector manufacturers wont really have, volume. There volumes compared to a home projector manufacturer is severely, severely limited, so this cost repayment has to be spread across a lot fewer units, where a home projector manufacturer that could drop 10-100 times more (even a thousand if first three years ago with a good price) can, ideally (some is dependent on licensing etc costs) spread it 10-100 times as cheaply per unit. So home projectors for less than $2000 using lasers are available today, and yesterday. The ultra hd part is cheap consumer tech now, even 8k is no longer so out of consumer reach. There are action cams that do 4k, and only a small fraction if their capability is needed to display 4k. A realistic base price for a 8k display card is virtually less than four times the price of the cheapest less than $100 4k display card. Smoke and mirror marketing. It is time for the computer industry to go and tell the movie industry and their partners the consumer electronics industry coalition, to go and jump, and take back the 'night' for themselves, and give the best technology for the best price, not just old rubbish, and the movie and CE industry can follow and catch up.

We can do 8k+ today and use it for presentation, outdoor advertising and light shows, and use it for photo and document editing now, and use it for multi-user home family and office computer touch surface displays now. The only reason we are all held back from these productivities, is the less than desirable coalition of forces designed to restrict things down to the field of a segment unrelated and irrelevant to these other industries. Furthermore and then industry can make its own custom technology standards to bring to market the latest technology it can. Any private group can make open source technologies to enable these new products and standards. For instance, an alternative studio camera interconnect based on thunderbolt 2 and 3 could be used on cameras and switchers and all station and studio infrastructure for video, to replace all existing interfaces. Using the data ability of TB to transport other cable protocols over it, simple adaptors could allow a TB camera to fit in a old cable arrangement, allow the cable to be replaced , allow an old switcher to work with TB cameras and cables, and progressively convert the whole lot to a theoretically 8k ready thunderbolt 3 (the TB interface has spare io pins that can handle multiple streams if used). This allow cameras to need only one interface type. This interface Also being cheaper and suitable for 8k computer and touch table displays.
 
About Red keeping silent. Now the competition is out marketing and spilling the beans, maybe it is time to say something?
 
"Something" would have been funny as well ;-)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top