High-end home-theater projector manufacturer SIM2 announced last week a partnership with startup company, Entertainment Experience, to market what they called a "Better-than-Blu" and "Beyond HD" home theater system. Using a new high-definition media format, the system will incorporate the standard specified by the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI), bringing full commercial cinema performance into the home for the first time.

Aldo Cugnini
Analyst

Speaking at the CEDIA Expo in Denver last week, SIM2’s VP of Marketing and Sales Charlie Boornazian said, "The time has come for top-tier home theater content to move beyond HDTV standards, to a format that can truly equal archival-quality film for visual content," and added, "we are opening the next era of home-theater performance."

Jim Sullivan, ex-Kodak Digital Cinema exec and now President of Entertainment Experience, said the collaboration with SIM2 offers the highest quality media solution on the market. The service is expected to have access to more than 4,000 library titles, plus many new movies that will be offered prior to the release of Blu-ray Disc and DVD titles. Movie studios will of course set title pricing, but Sullivan said he expects the average title’s selling price to be around $40.

The system will feature the SIM2 Grand Cinema C3X 1080p24 projector, bundled together with an HP media server. Content acquisition and distribution will be handled by Video Giants, which currently operates an HD Media Store that is integrated into home-theater media server PCs. Video collections in the current service come pre-packaged on a hard drive for plug-and-play installation, and can be custom installed on any one of several compatible media servers.

In the future, individual movie titles will be shipped directly to users on double-sided dual-layer DVD discs, but sources say that hard-disk delivery and Internet downloads may be supported as well. At three times the bitrate of today’s digital transfers, 50 Mb/s encoding will easily eat up 40-50GB of storage space per title, so the server’s hard disc drives will be available in different capacities ranging up to 4TBs (or about 100 titles maximum per drive). Compression is expected to use "all the good ones," says Sullivan, "including AVC and VC-1." Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management technology will protect the content, together with the AES256 encryption standard. With this security, titles can be played back from and transferred to only the hard drive of authorized players.

So, how does "Better-than-Blu" compare with the best Blu-ray encoding? For one, the extended DCI color gamut should allow for higher-saturated colors that are much closer to that of film performance. The DCI spec calls for 12-bit encoding using the X’Y'Z’ color space, and this means that the spec allows for colors beyond today’s state-of-the-art. However, the actual implementation will depend on the available color gamut of the projector. While this should certainly exceed that of Blu-ray performance, the question is, by how much? In addition, the use of JPEG2000 encoding at the higher bitrate means that no motion compensation is used - so expect near-lossless compression, i.e., a total absence of perceived compression artifacts.

The first products are expected to be available in January at prices to be announced. As the C3X currently retails at up to around $30,000 (depending on configuration), don’t expect the system to enter the mainstream market in our lifetime. Of course, my colleagues at Insight Media and I are at-the-ready to take on the burden of rebuilding our basements to perform a long and methodical review of this system in our homes, should any of the parties care to loan us an evaluation system…:)