On March 17th earlier this year I wrote a Display Daily titled "Laser Cinema May Be Coming." At the time, Laser Light Engines (LLE) announced they had solved the laser speckle problem for cinema-sized screens. They said potential customers had seen the demonstrations and been satisfied speckle would not be a problem. LLE did not announce who had seen the demo or who the potential customers were, other than the expected cast of large-screen projector manufacturers.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

In a press release last week dated July 14th, IMAX announced it had signed a memorandum of understanding with LLE and expected that after additional due diligence, they would sign a formal agreement. According to the IMAX announcement, "Under the terms of the agreement, IMAX plans to make an equity investment in Laser Light Engines, and Laser Light Engines would develop a custom version of its laser light technology for exclusive use in IMAX digital projection systems. Laser Light Engines would additionally provide outsourced research and development for new features designed to further enhance and distinguish The IMAX Experience for IMAX theatre operators, film studios and moviegoers."

As part of the parties’ contemplated partnership, "Laser Light Engines would offer its technology exclusively to IMAX for a period of two years and would not offer its technology to any other large format theatre systems for a period of three years. The memorandum of understanding signed by IMAX and Laser Light Engines gives the parties an exclusive period of time within which to reach final agreement on these and other terms."

In a conversation with Bill Beck, Co-founder and Executive Vice President of Business Development at LLE, he explained this exclusivity section of the IMAX announcement had caused some confusion. He said the exclusive agreement does not cover other large venue applications such as digital signage, corporate events or rock concerts. According to Beck, it also does not cover ordinary electronic or digital cinema. He says the 2 year exclusivity covers large venue theaters that compete with IMAX’s existing digital installations while the 3 year exclusivity covers the very largest screens, the ones where IMAX currently uses 70mm film.

We interpret this to mean that the lasers cannot be used in directly competing venues, but that the definition is a little vague. We also interpret this to mean that any relations LLE has with other projector makers serving the cinema and large venue segments are only very slightly affected by the exclusivity agreement. But in reality, Beck expects LLE to focus on the needs of its partner and part-owner in the short term.

For these very largest 70mm film screens, Beck believes it is necessary to have 80,000 - 100,000 lumens on screen. This can be accomplished this with perhaps 225,000 lumens from the laser source. He said he expects the custom laser for IMAX, which he called a "beamline," will produce about 30,000 white-balanced lumens. Therefore, for the very largest of IMAX 70mm film screens, IMAX will need about 8 of these beamlines feeding one projector via fiber optic coupling. Beck says the fiber optic coupling allows lasers to be used with the existing projectors.

According to Beck, IMAX has two major goals in going with laser illumination. First, lasers will provide a path for converting these very high output systems to digital cinema from the current 70mm film. With xenon lamps and digital projectors, it is simply not possible to get sufficient light on the screen to meet the IMAX standards, which require higher lumens on the screen than conventional cinema. This is a demand-pull issue: IMAX film theater operators want to convert to digital but currently cannot. IMAX wants to convert to digital as well: a 70mm film release print is not cheap nor is it easy to transport.

The second major goal is to convert the existing IMAX digital screens to laser to save on lamps and electricity. Currently these dual-projector digital installations require two expensive, water-cooled lamps with a lifetime of about 1000 hours. Beck said that lasers use about ½ of the power of xenon lamps when they produce the same lumens on the screen - and they last a heck of a lot longer than 1000 hours.

Beck added that the LLE laser solution works for both 2D and 3D cinema. He pointed out that speckle in 3D laser cinema is actually a more serious problem than it is for 2D cinema. He said that some of LLE’s (unnamed) competitors have said 5% speckle contrast is OK for cinema. He claims this just isn’t true, especially for 3D cinema.

For an expanded version of this article, see the upcoming August issue of Large Display Report.