In the theatre, is the new digital projection good for you?

chrisisall

Movies just don't look the same to me. In a great theatre they look okay; in a cheap one the look rather bad IMO.
Back in the day even cheap theatres' projection looked good. The nice theatres looked amazing.
To me, movies now look better at home....

Thoughts?

trevanian

With only four noteworthy exceptions (one of them a 2nd run house), none of the dozens of cinemas within 50 miles of where I grew up in San Jose were screening movies in a watchable fashion by 1980. They were all using inadequate projection systems that delivered very dark imagery, almost like a drive-in. I remember seeing a particular TREK film at a century theater and actually viewing an entire scene where no one was visible, but then driving to Palo Alto and seeing everything in fine detail (and with the correct aspect ratio, nothing masked off.)

Having said that, I find most digital projection to be godawful bad, even dimmer than the bad film projection, and it has contributed to my lack of movie attendance (I used to go to see at least two movies a week in the 80s, but now have only seen one movie in a theater since multiple viewings of GRAVITY, and that was last fall for a stopmotion movie, and it was a special screening for writers that I HAD to attend, and it was so dim I dozed off on it.)

There's just no incentive to see a movie in the theater unless it is a revival house showing an outstanding quality print, or unless you're in a city with a REAL Imax screen, not the fauxMax disasters that litter our landscape. Plus there aren't many movies I get excited about anymore, so the group experience is not the same.

Some of my best memories are of great moviegoing experiences, but I'm extremely pessimistic about the future, unless once they get these nextgen projectors up and running, they start reissuing great films so they can be properly screened.