January 28, 2003

Last spring, as the hype machine behind Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones revved into high gear, many entertainment reporters found themselves pursuing stories about digital technology with the same passion usually reserved for debates over the continued presence of Jar Jar Binks.

Two years earlier, George Lucas had warned theater owners that Episode IIwould only be shown in auditoriums equipped with digital-projection systems. That was the only way, he argued, that audiences could fully appreciate the serial epic, which was shot and edited without benefit of film.

Financially strapped exhibitors were given the choice of complying with Lucas' demands or finding something else to put on their screens come May 16, 2002. At the time, no one saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding coming - or, for that matter, Spider-Man - and the theater owners poised to do battle with King George.

Considering that Nia Vardalos' legs ultimately proved to be longer than Jar Jar's and Spidy's, the exhibitors' obsession with landing Episode II now looks foolish. Going into last year's ShoWest convention, though, no one was 100 percent sure how the showdown would end.

Ultimately, Lucas would be the first one to blink. But that's only because the manufacturers of digital equipment couldn't possibly produce and install enough digital projectors to satisfy the maestro.

As anyone who sampled both the analog and digital versions of Episode II can attest, Lucas' instincts were absolutely correct. The movie looked much better in a digitally equipped house.

So did other digitally generated flicks, like Ice Age, Lilo and Stitch and Spirited Away.

Nonetheless, the high cost associated with retrofitting an auditorium for digital projection remained prohibitive for most exhibitors. By year's end, no satisfactory economic model was yet in sight, and audiences weren't clamoring for expansion of electronic cinema.

The installed base of about 120 screens isn't much greater now than it was last May, so the revolution has been postponed at least until the release of "Episode III."

At the recently completed International Consumer Electronics Show, though, it was possible to detect some forward movement on the home front.

Several of the high-definition and large-screen televisions and home projectors on exhibit featured Digital Light Processing technology from Texas Instruments. The same wafer-sized, million-mirror chips found in theater projectors were being used to enhance the images seen on sets built by LG Electronics/Zenith, Panasonic, Samsung, Thomson and SIM2 Multimedia.

Among the manufacturers of home-cinema projectors employing DLP technology were Marantz, NEC, Plus Vision, Sharp, Toshiba and Yamaha.

"Fundamentally, the same chips are used in theater projectors and in home systems," explained John R. Reder, manager of tabletop television with Texas Instruments. "A cinema projector usually has a bit higher resolution, but each mirror is exactly the same. It tilts at the same angle and is driven the same way.

"Cinema projectors are always front-projection, because you have to fill up an enormous screen and there's a long throw. But, yes, we have taken what was brought into theaters and applied it to the home."

To this reporter's untrained eyes, the sets with DLP did seem a bit brighter and crisper than those without it. But having suffered through decades of fuzzy images delivered via cathode-ray tubes, almost any improvement in rear-projection, big-screen TV would be a godsend.

In addition to CRT and DLP, the dominant display technologies for big-screen TVs are liquid-crystal (LCD) and plasma. Their introduction has resulted in the ascendancy of flat-screen monitors and other thinner, lighter sets.

The good news for homeowners considering upgrading their home cinemas is that they won't have to spend $100,000-plus retrofitting their rec rooms. The bad news is that high-end, big-screen HDTV sets still will set them back at least six G's.

Smaller sized, fully integrated HDTV units are available in the $3,000-4,000 range, and their picture quality is excellent. Viewers hoping to optimize the DVD experience are thinking bigger, though.

Reder helped me unscramble the rat's-nest of numerical standards used to define high-definition in this country.

"HD is either 1080i, for interlaced displays like CRT, or 720p for progressive displays, like ours," he said. "If you took native material in 1080i, and fed it through a CRT and DLP, you'd think the CRT would be at an advantage. But we beat it in sharpness even then.

"We do sell lower-resolution chips - 480p -- which actually play very well in the home-theater space, because that's full, anamorphic DVD."

The upside comes, he added, "in a more moderate price for the home-theater market, where manufacturers can take our chip and put very high-quality optics around it … zoom lenses, lens-shift features. They can give up a little bit of the light to get much better contrast."

None of this, I suspect, will discourage moviegoers in the demographic most attractive to Hollywood executives from quenching their thirst for entertainment in the local multiplex. Disenfranchised older viewers, however, might find much to like in the theater-quality presentation now being delivered on high-end home-entertainment units.

God help us, then, if Hollywood decides that producing theatrical entertainment for adults no longer is cost effective, and it can save a bundle by delivering its prestige titles directly to stay-at-home audiences via pay-per-view. If digital cinema can reduce expenses enough to prevent that from happening, I'm all for it.

Email Gary Dretzka