By Michael Karagosian
Digital cinema’s greatest challenge is its cost. The cinema marketplace isn’t big enough to allow the scale of manufacturing needed to produce equipment inexpensively. To get the benefit of scale, components need to be off-the-shelf. In other words, they need to be useful for things other than digital cinema. Of course, the stumper is that if digital cinema were off-the-shelf, the cinema experience wouldn’t be unique. So it’s a rare and valuable opportunity when a system architecture emerges that begs for off-the-shelf components. This is precisely the direction the industry can move in with the trend to put the media block inside the projector.
