IMAX NEWS
Big screen? What’s the big deal?
Monday, November 9 by Mark Bretherton
With cinemas all trying to outdo each other with claims for the better cinema experience we thought it was time to revisit just what it is that makes the IMAX experience in Darling Harbour so special.
First up we have a pretty good claim – we have the world’s biggest cinema screen and that means we absolutely dwarf every other screen in Sydney (IMAX or otherwise). That’s great, but it wouldn’t be much of a claim if we couldn’t fill it with a high quality picture and we do that by being the only cinema in Sydney screening films using giant IMAX film that is of superb quality and resolution. It’s ten times bigger than your average cinema film size and of superb quality and resolution (and digital still has a very long way to come to get close to this sort of resolution!).
This all means something special when it comes to 3D. Firstly the 3D experience benefits from a big screen (you want to feel as though you are ‘in the movie’ after all), so the bigger the screen, the more immersive the experience. Secondly, and just as important, 3D works best when you are looking directly at the screen (not up at it, or down at it), which is why our combination of giant screen and steeply raked seating is the optimum way to enjoy 3D (our theatre architecture was created with 3D in mind, most digital 3D screens are retrofitted into existing cinemas that were originally designed for 2D films). So here’s our tip when you’re looking for a good 3D experience – you want the biggest screen you can find and you want seating that puts you perpendicular to the screen.
Got an opinion on big screens or 3D? We’d like to hear them.
First up we have a pretty good claim – we have the world’s biggest cinema screen and that means we absolutely dwarf every other screen in Sydney (IMAX or otherwise). That’s great, but it wouldn’t be much of a claim if we couldn’t fill it with a high quality picture and we do that by being the only cinema in Sydney screening films using giant IMAX film that is of superb quality and resolution. It’s ten times bigger than your average cinema film size and of superb quality and resolution (and digital still has a very long way to come to get close to this sort of resolution!).
This all means something special when it comes to 3D. Firstly the 3D experience benefits from a big screen (you want to feel as though you are ‘in the movie’ after all), so the bigger the screen, the more immersive the experience. Secondly, and just as important, 3D works best when you are looking directly at the screen (not up at it, or down at it), which is why our combination of giant screen and steeply raked seating is the optimum way to enjoy 3D (our theatre architecture was created with 3D in mind, most digital 3D screens are retrofitted into existing cinemas that were originally designed for 2D films). So here’s our tip when you’re looking for a good 3D experience – you want the biggest screen you can find and you want seating that puts you perpendicular to the screen.
Got an opinion on big screens or 3D? We’d like to hear them.
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Adam 4 months agoWhere are the AVATAR tickets! You're breaking my heart Sydney IMAX.
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Amanda 2 months agoTo make this more concrete, we make a technical step. We perform a complex rotation to go to Euclidean space, rather than Minkowski. This is a rotation on some of the fields in complex space (leading to h00 → −h00 ). The result is that we may use on the 2-dimensional space an Euclidean metric, which makes all surfaces much better behaved.
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Mark Bretherton IMAX Theatre Sydney 4 months agoThe wait is over, they are on sale as of 3pm on Tuesday (10 Nov). We've also introduced allocated seating for all sessions (best available seat). Enjoy.
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chris 4 months agoI would like imax sydney to speak with dolby about there spectral division 3d. It's far superior to polorised linear or circular. the only issue is that the filmes would need to be colour corrected before they are printed as you can't use a digital adjustment box. I always go to rouse hill reading cinemas. Best theatre in particular there digital 3d theatre. the quality is just awesome and there screen are big is better catered scale wise. If you wish to see what i mean. Watch a christmas carol 3d in imax polarised method then go to rouse hill reading cinemas and watch it is dolby 3d. The dolby will win hands down. I love the imax but after such an awweful experience watching a blurry poorly scaled transformers. i have never gone back. The bluray copy is better than the imax print. Aslong as you guys scale the films correctly. DON'T try degraining a print for the imax. you'll loose detail and try resharpening which makes it worse again. Remember 35mm ain't imax. Remember people pay for the imax experience. You shouldn't charge a premium if the content isn't imax or on par. Considering the ticket cost is $27 for avatar. The quality better be better then that of a dolby theater which is $19.50. Screen might be big but anyone would take image quality oversize any day.
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Alice Brider 3 months ago"Excuse me Sydney Imax?" "Yes Alice?" "WHERE THE HELL ARE THE ALICE IN WONDERLAND TICKETS?????????????" Sorry about that, but it's rather important you see. The tickets - if I can get them - will be my 15th birthday present, and (i know it's slightly comical) my name is Alice so it's only fitting that I love this story... besides the fact that Tim Burton makes some of the best freaking movies of all time. Please let me know when the tickets will be available. Yours Sincerely, Alice Brider
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rex 2 months ago"Got an opinion on big screens or 3D? We’d like to hear them." LOL * Poor black level: Some light passes through even when liquid crystals completely untwist, so the best black color that can be achieved is varying shades of dark gray, resulting in worse contrast ratios and detail in the image * Narrower viewing angles than competing technologies. It is nearly impossible to use an LCD without some image warping occurring. * LCDs rely heavily on thin-film transistors, which are easily damaged, resulting in a defective pixel. The number of defective pixels at which the LCD is determined to be unusable varies (see ISO 13406-2). LCDs currently have a rejection rate of about 50% but this is improving. A larger screen size requires more transistors, which increases the chances of yielding a defective LCD. Technology advancements are slowly easing this problem. * Typically have slower response times than Plasmas, which can cause ghosting and blurring during the display of fast-moving images. This is also improving by increasing the refresh rate of LCD displays[15]
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Kate 2 months agoA DLP projector creates an image using a digital micromirror device (DMD chip), which on its surface contains a large matrix of microscopic mirrors, each corresponding to one pixel in an image. Each mirror can be rotated to reflect light such that the pixel appears bright, or the mirror can be rotated to direct light elsewhere and make the pixel appear dark. The mirror is made of aluminum and is rotated on an axle hinge. There are electrodes on both sides of the hinge controlling the rotation of the mirror using electrostatic attraction. The electrodes are connected to an SRAM cell located under each pixel, and charges from the SRAM cell drive the movement of the mirrors. Color is added to the image-creation process either through a spinning color wheel (used with a single-chip projector) or a three-chip (red, green, blue) projector. The color wheel is placed between the lamp light source and the DMD chip such that the light passing through is colored and then reflected off a mirror to determine the level of darkness. A color wheel consists of a red, green, and blue sector, as well as a fourth sector to either control brightness or include a fourth color. This spinning color wheel in the single-chip arrangement can be replaced by red, green, and blue light-emitting diodes (LED). The three-chip projector uses a prism to split up the light into three beams (red, green, blue), each directed towards its own DMD chip. The outputs of the three DMD chips are recombined and then projected.
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Lorenzo 2 months agoTo understand hadronic particles as excited states of strings, we have to study the dynamical properties of these strings, and then quantize the theory. At first sight, this seems to be straightforward. We have a string with mass per unit of length T and a tension force which is also T (in units where c = 1). Think of an infinite string stretching in the z direction. The transverse excitation is described by a vector xtr (z, t) in the x y direction, and the excitations move with the speed of sound, here equal to the speed of light, in the positive and negative z -direction. This is nothing but a two-component massless field theory in one space-, one time-dimension. Quantizing that should not be a problem.
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Lorenzo 2 months agoRapeseed is grown for the production of animal feed, vegetable oil for human consumption, and biodiesel; leading producers include the European Union, Canada, the United States, Australia, China and India. In India, it is grown on 13% of cropped land. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, rapeseed was the third leading source of vegetable oil in the world in 2000, after soybean and oil palm, and also the world's second leading source of protein meal, although only one-fifth of the production of the leading soybean meal.
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Henny Musa,eSurvey '09' Winner! :P 2 months agoIt says your name on the iphone receipt well i just wanted to say hi!
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Slightly Bemused 2 months agoJust a thought, what is all this tech talk for? Digital projection quality is still a little behind for a screen the size of the Sydney IMAX, so all this talk of digital projectors is a little irrelevant at the moment. And to @chris, quit whining to the Sydney guys about scaling images etc, they just show the films, not make them. Take your gripes up with the production people.
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alex 2 months agowhats the point when you cant even get tickets for a week, sort it out!
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