http://www.hinduonnet.com/2004/06/18/st ... 621300.htm


India, world leader in e-cinema

By Anand Parthasarathy



SINGAPORE, JUNE 17. A summit on digital cinema has revealed a surprising and little known fact that India is the world leader in the cutting edge of e-cinema — digitally delivered and exhibited.

At the "BroadcastAsia 200" Conference here on Wednesday, Sunil Patil, chief executive officer of the Mumbai-based Adlabs Films, said that over 130 cinema theatres, most of them in the small towns of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Gujarat, had changed over from film-based systems and were exhibiting their fare using digital projectors backed by computer servers. Their number was poised to go up to 200 by August when the country would have more digital screens than the rest of the world put together. July will also see an Indian cinema house — Adlabs' own preview theatre in Mumbai — receive the entire movie via satellite direct from the processing lab, notching another landmark in digital cinema.

Since April 2003, one Indian film a week — mostly Hindi — has been released in digital format, in addition to the conventional celluloid version. This has made India one of the world's first adopters of digital-all-the-way delivery and exhibition.

Other early movers in Asia are China, currently with 57 digital screens, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan. Host Singapore notched up a world first when in May this year, the local Eng Wah organisation inaugurated the first-ever digital cinema deployment across five screens of a multiplex — all with the maximum quality rating. Thomas Lin, Director Games and Entertainment for the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, said the city-state was positioning itself to become a hub for all aspects of D-Cinema.

Chong Man-Nang, chief executive of GDC Technology Ltd., a partner with Adlabs and Mukta Arts, for server technology, told The Hindu that units made by the company and deployed in India used open systems such as Linux and global standards like MPEG-2.

Brooke Williams of Texas Instruments, whose Digital Light Processor chip fuels the digital, explained that the systems were scalable — from the cost effective solutions that Adlabs was harnessing, to "2K" systems — jargon for projections of 2048 pixels across 1080 pixels, where the quality exceeded the best that the old fi-based projectors could deliver.

The Indian experience of e-cinema, which also translated into affordable cinema, was the subject of much discussion here because uniquely among nations in the region, the digital drive had received no government support, and was very much a home-grown solution. "You have beaten Hollywood at its game" said one speaker — a reference to the rather slow pace of acceptance of digital cinema in the United States, the country that virtually invented the technology.







I thought 2K was less than 35mm resolution?

If I remember right, it's less than 35mm negative resolution but higher than the resolution achieved in practice in release prints and conventional cinema projection.

http://www.etconsult.com/papers/Technic ... lution.pdf