Tech innovations set to make cinema viewing a more immersive experience

The next time you walk into the PVR cinema at the Promenade mall in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj, you might be tempted to pay ~100-odd more than the usual price of a movie ticket to experience what Samsung claims — and PVR seconds — is the future of cinemas.

Onyx, Samsung’s technological innovation for movie theatres, is an LED screen that replaces conventional projection and promises to deliver unbeatable picture quality and vibrant colours. The projector is, of course, the only way theatres have screened films for over a century. But this isn’t to say that projection hasn’t gone through many cycles of innovation. IMAX and Dolby Cinema are the most recent examples.

Both Onyx and IMAX claim to deliver an immersive visual and audio experience. But Samsung insists that Onyx can’t be compared to IMAX.

Well, technically Samsung is right. 

Motion picture studios have to spend more time post-production to create the IMAX format. While this is easy for big production houses such as Universal, Warner Bros and others, the smaller studios don’t have the bandwidth to go the extra mile. 

In contrast, Samsung’s Onyx Cinema LED Screen can play 2K or 4K content almost in a plug-and-play manner. It is DCI-certified (Digital Cinema Initiatives) — a standardisation for creating digital film formats for theatres — which means that it doesn’t need a different film format. Cinemas can simply install the Onyx screen and start showing films that the server feeds directly into the screen. In other words, there is no beam of light travelling from the projection booth to a white canvas.

An LED screen has several advantages over conventional projection. The latter leads to a considerable loss of brightness — up to 35 per cent. There is a loss of resolution too. Even the best digital projectors deliver a peak contrast ratio of 10,000:1. In comparison, the Onyx LED screen affords minimum loss of brightness, no loss in resolution and has a very high contrast ratio.

“Even lower-quality content is automatically enhanced by Onyx,” claims Puneet Sethi, vice-president, consumer electronics enterprise business, Samsung India.
 

 However, the peak brightness levels will be best used in 3D, and PVR is yet to test it out. Eliminating the projector booth also means that there’s more space for seats. “We would also be using the space saved for the server room and theatre management system room,” says Gautam Dutta, the CEO of PVR.

Dutta says that after installing Onyx, screen occupancy has shot up by about 10 per cent on weekdays and 20 per cent on weekends. The company plans to install four more Onyx screens in India in the next 15 months. Walking into the Onyx PVR, the first thing one notices is the size of the screen. At 10.2 m wide and 5.4 m tall, it is smaller than the usual projector screens. (Samsung is yet to launch its largest Onyx screen in India which is 14m wide and 7.2 m high.)  We watched The Nun, and the run-of-the-mill story seemed a little more bearable because of the optimum brightness levels, the depth of the colour black, and the saturation of colours. There was no loss of detail in low light shots and no grains visible in brightly-lit day scenes — both of which are sometimes an issue in traditional projection.

As for the sound, the speakers are placed on top of the screen, and the woofers at the bottom. Samsung says its 5.1 JBL surround sound system uses an advanced filter technology to give the impression of sound coming from the screen. This, the company claims, also widens the “sweet spot” for the best sound received in the theatre — from just the middle to almost the entire auditorium.

Among the unique selling points of Onyx are its HDR (High Definition Range) capability, and the fact that its visual experience is unaffected by ambient light. However, since the JLB surround sound needs four walls, outdoor cinemas with Onyx are out of question.

But there could be other uses of ambient light screening, such as dine-in screening and concerts. In fact, PVR LIVE, a property which exhibits non-studio content, plans to use Onyx. PVR will also continue to charge a premium on tickets and is looking at sponsorships to justify the lavish spend. “The adoption of the new technology will increase as acceptance increases,” says Bharat Shenoy, market analyst at IDC India.

While Onyx definitely represents a quantum leap in movie screening technology, it may not be the natural next step for theatres — at least not until more 4K and HDR content is out there to make the most of its potential. Also, the huge price difference between Onyx and digital projectors — ~50-60 million — could prove to be a damper.  

However, competition could push prices down and help create more high-quality content. Sony, in addition to some other LED manufacturers, is developing a similar technology for theatres called the crystal LEDs. Conventional projection could eventually become a thing of the past. 

But all in good time.