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  • 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..

Jeremy, good to see you mate.

It was Jeremy I meant.

Antony Newman said:
- I thought Red still had a speckle issue (caused by coherent light emission / most noticeable in red and green light). Epson get around this by using a non-coherent light source for red and green, and only using direct blue laser light)

- I thought Red had an issue with the max power output of multiple lasers (RGB). Epson got around this by only using blue laser light.

- The Christie has 2 sets of RGB primaries (which is an ok compromise). Both eyes displayed at the same time. But I suspect this would limit the ability to render 2020 extremes / or restrict the power on blue laser choice (as two differing frequency powerful blue lasers would have to be sourced). REDs solution is superior here as only 1 RGB set would be used.

- With no consumer content in 4k, and no HDMI2.0 (or other) standard, no agreed wide colour gamut - releasing a Red laser PJ early would lead to a loss or a higher until cost ... and the need to add consumer connectors When they eventually got established. They probably factored in that streaming .RED over the net would sell more projectors, and give a steady influx of new orders (eg odemax).

AJ
Click to expand...

Antony, it is not as bad as it seems.

The solution is reconfigurable connectors, so the HDMI spec can be upgraded, like they currently have done on Sony TV for example. But you can prepare got higher doses too. Color gamut support is only a software upgrade, Until then they can emulate wide gamut support by setting the content to a custom wide color spec that the projector understands. A custom internal connector that you can put standard connector circuits, like display port to HDMI adapter does, onto is another option. The easier way is to use the latest upcoming thunderbolt and display port and then a standard adaptor. The format between thunderbolt and the projector can be completely custom. So there is no real hindrance.

I don't see two sets of primaries absolutely stopping 2020 capability, it might be a minor diminishment, it depends on primary separations and if you want to add different polarisations.

We have people doing 4k content everyday, before the studios come to the party. Its s growing market, we are likely get more of it before the projectors died.

Power of lasers us an issue, especially if you only use pure primaries, as the colors with most visual response for energy are a bit complementary, so something like 6 colors for 2D gives the highest response for energy usage, and a 6 color system (I do not know if the same) is used to give the largest color gamut (like the 4 color system tries on Sharp TV's).

There are Lasers that get such high energy efficiencies that they convert their output to other primaries. The efficiency depends on the process. But the trick is that you really don't need lasers as such. I think Novalux was doing something for the laservue TV's

There are ways to cure speckle, but I don't know the effects on color gamut. Anything over 140% or 170%, is pretty good, and between 170% and 200% might not be much difference (maybe it might be 180 or 190% things tap out). As long as they can get most of the way there, it might not matter.

Thanks



Elsie. Last Picture Show, I get it. ;)

But I'm not thinking anywhere that expensive, you set up in a local community venue, have a truck & caravan, spend the money you save at home . Cheap, but not nasty. There are even outdoor blowup screens (but I would not like yo repair the punctures when a storm bones through). You ask local authorities for their help as a community service (free venue usage). if they don't. you pass on the cost of the venue in ticket price. If you have a small local production launch you might get something big and local actors, or on the city. I think unless you are a boutique in the city, it is going to be fairly shoestring budget to make a good living. I love $10 it less tickets. ;)


Wayne.
 
We went with $10 per ticket across the board since it made processing admissions that much easier. We also manage all the admissions and concessions via iPad with Shopify. It allows you to know in real time what your sales are, how much of each product you're selling and so on.

The blow up screen is a bit more than 3x the price of our Strong MDI screen. It certainly appears to be an easier solution to assemble but we've been working with ours for 6 months now and we've got the whole load in/load out process pretty smooth with getting everything set up and operational in under three hours. Then everything sits put for the weekend until tear down.

Our biggest challenge is the projector sits dark for the periods in between weekend screenings so we have to ingest the DCP's and process the KDM's right away. If using the esata cable instead of the supplied FW400 you're cutting your capture time in half...occasionally we have a KDM that is wonky and we've got to call Technicolor of Deluxe to process and email a new one. Thus far (knock on wood) we've not had any problems. That's the beauty of DCP's -they're rock solid.

That said, I think there's plenty of room to innovate with the projectors aside from laser tech. I am quite shocked by how scared the studios are of piracy and how that's translated into zero opportunity to screen a given film without firing up the lamp and dowser. That obviously uses much more power and reduces bulb life...not a huge issue but what I don't get is why they can't have something in the projector or where the server sits or on the touch panel enabling operators to check playback and sound. You can even watermark the freaking image if you like to protect against copying off of the LCD.

It would be nice to be able to build the evening's shows remotely (i.e. getting your trailers and ads in place with blacks and such with each given movie).

Christie has a remote iPhone app that's pretty cool so you don't even need to technically be in the room to fire up the projector.

Point being, someone does need to shake up the projector industry -it's just a shame it couldn't be Red. Their codec is incredible and could dominate how DCP's are generated...instead of physical hard drives Deluxe and Technicolor could be using USB sticks and saving tons in the shipping process.
 
I was trying to line up an 8k chip for a personal laser projector, but my engineer got himself the head of his own multinational sponsored company before we could get going. The chip would not be suitable for a theatre screen, I was concerned and doing the calculations just for a 2 meter screen in the dark. However, they could probably do a bigger chip in 16k+ (I am more interested in presentation/advertising usage etc needing bigger resolutions. This is one way to open up the projector and monitor markets, ignore movies, let some cheap Chinese firm make the projectors for everybody else and move to movies afterwards, probably letting another company using their parts to make a theatre protector within 5 years ). I think I know enough now to achieve a near true black and avoid speckle, or at least know who to go to, to negotiate it. I'd prefer to avoid lasers due to all the issues
 

This may be of interest to Red (if the news hasn't already trickled into PJ R&D)

http://phys.org/news/2015-01-laser-images-tomorrow-technology.html

"For full-field imaging, the speckle contrast should be less than ~4% to avoid any disturbance for human inspection," explained Hui Cao, professor of applied physics and of physics, who is the paper's corresponding author. "As we showed in the paper, the standard edge-emitting laser produced speckle contrast of ~50%, while our laser has the speckle contrast of 3%. So our new laser has completely eliminated the issue of coherent artifact for full-field imaging."

AJ
 
Yeah, I was looking at using LED to solve the speckle problem.I disagree you can't get a bright enough light source though my techniques. But they issue he is talking about here probably refers to using a scanning beam over a large area. As you can see led has been used for LCD TV, projection TV, projectors, even OLED TV for years, but using single light source for a 40 feet high screen is another thing. There is also an existing commercial solution to laser speckle too. Red is just slow in bringing this one forth, maybe we will get it when they announce free floating hologram product, and we might get that shortly before they announce hard light holograms. :)
 
So where are the new projectors? This is killing me...we've wanted an affordable solution for some time now but have had to go with Barco, which is the lowest entry point into the DCP-based projector world.
 
They are not really "affordable".
 
It's all relative Wayne. I'm referring to cinema grade, DCP based projection. Would be great if the entry level for a complete system including lens, server and 4K projector could get below 50K. The only one is the Sony 510P but that's for Europe only...and like many projectors it's basically a system that's been cut back as far as power and lumens output, but the same guts.
 
I think the figure might have been something like in the $20-30k range, and you add extra laser light engines for more power for bigger screens. Somebody mentioned it while ago somewhere.

Getting off of high dreaming cinema usage, I'd prefer to see realistically priced entry model, the same as s 50 inch Ultra HD set plus Redray (or without Redray) and + screen. The projection market has long been a real rip off place, and charging more than them is no mighty solution. Redray hardware, and obtaining licensing and provision on a really good screen technology to use with the projector, is probably more real cost than selling the projector on its own. An integrated projector is not that much, its selling it in volume, where you need that screen tech to produce the results from the projector to do that. Also an optional laservue rear projection like enclosure to plug it into. Maybe laservue might be interested in doing the consumer/professional version at Sony like prices?

What is really lacking is 8k+, the events and advertising markets really cry out for 8-16k, and parrallel TB ports can deliver this. An 8k 11 inch screen was recently shown at CES, and 16k projection chips have been done for s while.

The military are not terribly smart, maybe they need to dump the military themes, and adopt one of scientists, engineers, and business men developing products. We develop the real world. Maybe then things will start happening again. Steve Jobs pirates theme didn't do things, the enginees and business men did EVERYTHING.
 
Oh, that's this thread, I thought it was one of the smaller threads in the Redray subforum.
 
I just received a quote for the Christie 4K 4220...$86,000 CDN for the projector, lens and server. This is what I'm saying...nothing affordable in the 4K projection racket. The Barco 4K 23B is $74,000.
 
Jeremy. You got to realise, apples and oranges, it is not an affordable apple, but an orange, which are all not too affordable. Things can be done much more affordably, but these oranges are too limited in sales to lower costs, and upmarket. They seek to exploit a money stream for as much and ultimately the consumer pays. It is like saying a lambogini is affordable because it is not that Audi worth millions. Way above average persons affordability. So affordable inva way, but not terribly.
 
The true retail price of a 16k home professional projector is probably closer to $500.
 
Who has the will to have the way. This concentration on the high end encoding movie streaming is a loss. People will buy to look at 4k content on various platforms (like bluray 4K) and the big content licensers should be content. The grandiose schemes of a nation wide locked content network are uneeded, you can start without one.
 
Wayne I don't understand your musings here on this thread...I've been trying to drive conversation about a professional projector for the masses, as Red projector was meant to do.

Whatever the reason Red has abandoned it -they know the importance of 4K display- but there must have been legit reasons why they walked away. Certainly Red was aware they could have led and captured significant market share.

In the absence of Red, does anyone have any more information as to current projector developments (i.e. legit design and release plans?)
 
As before, Red aimed at one thing then aimed at something higher, but likely that stalled so they forgot the smaller thing. The other thing is the safety concerns, new research and likely regulation on scanned lasers. If they use a scanning system, their maximum output just went down to living/workspace sizes. I had a solution for this to maintain high brightness, but I did not hear from anybody. I also spoke to somebody that finds led lights too harsh tonight, and I think the word "headache" might gave been mentioned. So unless Red looked up the literature and found this is a problem with scanned laser displays, they might gave found such a thing in trials.

Another thing is that it is not too costly to do a professional consumer projector, but puting together manufacturing, marketing Abe distribution is Now that quantum dot displays with a proper full HDMI 2 port are likely out, it further devalues such a lowcost projector, so that under 10k might no longer seem as attractive to a wider audience. Truth is, sell something desirable, then you can charge more, charge enough so that only the Spielberg's types think its cheap, and you might not well do many. So sell 8k+ and at least advertisers and laser light shows people will want it (plays computer touch table people of course). We are talking maybe up to 1 in a 1000 people for advertising (every significant store can use one as a workhorse) for advertising based on American income, so up to 300k-600k projectors world wide. Now step back and realise a desirable future proof (upgradable interface and security protocol board) 8k+ projector with laser is desirable, and with good screen we might see one in ten households wanting such a device, based on units of American income, works wide that maybe over 200 million projectors. Releasing a basic version consumer/professional editing and grading projector first through an established company can achieve that cheaply. The Mitsubishi laservue brand comes to mind. A home projector with optional cabinet, where the projector can.he swung up to a bigger screen above, like with the Hector. Just some realistic idea. Of course Mit might not be interested on terms Red would like, but even a Chinese manufacture might be interested.

So yes, I'm not happy, we have pointed all the advantages before, but as long as competition steak in on the table, we are not going to see much else.
 
Biggest surprise of IBC 2015, or should we all just give up on this?????
 
Hopefully it's not dead, but I fear it is. Forget the REDRAY portion of the product, the projector itself is seriously needed in the market. There are so few 4K projection options out there and none that fall into a reasonable price range for high-end consumer or independent professional use. The most capable and aggressively priced 4K projector on the market is the Sony 600ES (500ES outside N.America/Japan) and it still carries a $15K list price -- under $9K street price if you can sweet talk the right dealer into selling it at cost or find a grey-market unit. Still has outdated Xenon lamp tech with overpriced bulbs. Suffers from typical problems with all consumer/ prosumer projectors like focus and lens position drifting. Terrible onboard focus/calibration tools and interface...

Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC, etc.. don't even have 4K projectors to offer. JVC has some that they try to loosely market as 4K and they accept 4K input, but use pixel shifting, up-rezzing and wobulation to fudge it.
 
I am guessing at the 8k point - high power LED or LASER projectors will enable both low cost and the ability to project half dome imagery (eg Android Jones wrap around 17 min short ....which was completely mind blowing)

AJ
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Hopefully it's not dead, but I fear it is. Forget the REDRAY portion of the product, the projector itself is seriously needed in the market. There are so few 4K projection options out there and none that fall into a reasonable price range for high-end consumer or independent professional use. The most capable and aggressively priced 4K projector on the market is the Sony 600ES (500ES outside N.America/Japan) and it still carries a $15K list price -- under $9K street price if you can sweet talk the right dealer into selling it at cost or find a grey-market unit. Still has outdated Xenon lamp tech with overpriced bulbs. Suffers from typical problems with all consumer/ prosumer projectors like focus and lens position drifting. Terrible onboard focus/calibration tools and interface...

Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC, etc.. don't even have 4K projectors to offer. JVC has some that they try to loosely market as 4K and they accept 4K input, but use pixel shifting, up-rezzing and wobulation to fudge it.
Click to expand...

Just saw a post for the Panasonic 4K laser projector and found myself longing for the release of the REDray Projector again... I wish it would resurface! Still now news about it, it seems!?
 
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