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2160p for home cinema?


kenratboy

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Hi, have not posted in a while, but I am still around :P

I
have been looking at 2160p digital cinema projectors and drooling, and
obviously cannot afford one (or the dedicated and large HT it would
require), but interested in if it could be done. Christie, Sony
Professional, and others have 2160p projectors - if you could get it to
work in a HT (150-200" screen), could it accept the signals? Does
anyone make a scaler that will take images up to 2160?

It would sure look good and would be a load of fun.

IIRC,
the 5000 lumes Sony projector is $50k, plus another $25k or so for the
lens and other bits. Obviously shockingly expensive, but I seem to
remember Vidikron selling $100,000 CRT units 10+ years ago, so $75k
today doesn't seem like a big deal for those with deep pockets.
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You know, we get all settled on 1080P. Which there is NO broadcast info at this rate yet...

So everyone runs out to get thier blue ray / HD discs.. and now we have 2160p... So will todays gear be toast?

Figures!! hahahahaha

I am really really happy with the ISF disc at 720p .....

Even with big pockets $75,000 is a LOT of money, trust me. I seriously doubt one person would throw it all away as nothing on this forum?

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Well, the watch forum I post on, there is a guy from Singapore who we have helped purchase over $1,000,000 USD in watches in the last year.

My point is the mega-buck 9" CRT's sold a decade or so ago, and I see no reason people would not spend the same for home theater today.

I am not arguing if its a good or bad idea, only if its feasable to make it work with equiptment that can be purchased and used for DVD players, DirecTV, HD-DVD/BR, etc.

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You could get that resolution from a HTPC that was upscaling anything. 1080p would look pretty good quadrupled I bet but it would take a lot of processing power and RAM to do so.

If a 2160p source was available: Figure that a video card does 32 bits per pixel. There are 3840 x 2160 = 8,294,400 pixels then x 32 bits would be 265,420,800 bits of total information or 33,177,600 bytes or ~31.6 Megabytes per image. Now 24 frames per second would be about 760MB / second being processed and shot at the screen. Ultra SCSI 640 can do bursts of up to 640MB/second but not sustained at that rate. So you would need to copy your video to an Ultra SCSI 640 RAID 0 array in order for it to be even read off the drive fast enough to keep up at 24fps. Now try 60fps and you're looking at needing a dozen drives. Ultra-640 drives are pretty hard to come by and cost a fortune. A HTPC that could play prestored 2160p video would probably end up costing over $50,000 and would probably need a least a 10u high server box since the hard drives would have to be inside to get the full speed out of the drives.

I'd love to build you one...what's your number? lol

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We are talking nearly movie theater resolutions here, 2k and 4k are theater resolutions. Even at VERY large screen sizes for home theater, like 150", this is overkill. There is a lot of room for image quality improvement in 1080p projectors still, and a lot of room for improvement up and down the pipeline in the encoding and playback process. Humans can discern color saturation and contrast more than they can discern pure resolution, and these come from encoding and quality of the playback devices.

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True, but the professional projectors from Christie and the like can produce a HUGE color spectrum. Pioneer plasmas have incredibly rich color and I think they have somewhere around a color pallet of around 100 billion displayable colors. The current generation Christie projectors have around 35 trillion and true minimum contrast ratios of around 2000:1. Either way though, I can fondly (and vividly) remember the first DLP cinema I went to. It was Star Wars Ep. III and the image quality was just something that was just mindblowing for those of you who haven't experienced it yet. Now if I could only find a digital cinema in my area with a Klipsch Audio system.

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I think in the future higher pixel count LCD projectors will for sure come on the market. They will have a higher pixel count so that they can upsample the 1080p images to 2160p or whatever to give a crisper image without any SDE. I don't think we'll see any on the market for a ehile yet as 1080p LCDs have not been stretched to their limits yet.

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