Home Theater Geeks 450 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
 

00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I continue my conversation with Mike Heiss, who attended the 2024 Cedia Expo in Denver, colorado. In this episode, we talk about the video products that were there. So stick around.

00:18 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:22 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
This is TWiT. Hey there, Scott Wilkinson. Here, the home theater geek. In this episode I continue my conversation with Mike Heiss, who attended the 2024 Cedia Expo in Denver, Colorado, September 8th, 6th to 8th, something like that. Anyway, early in September, Fifth to seventh. Fifth to seventh. Thank you very much. And there we have the disembodied, now embodied voice of Mike Heiss, journalist, consultant and jolly good Cedia fellow. Hey, mike, welcome back.

01:07 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Hey Scott, good to be back, it's. You know I went to Cedia. I took one for the team.

01:12 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
You did take one for the team. I was unable to go, and so I value greatly your ability to come and tell us all about it. So, like I said before, it was in Denver, colorado. We just want to show quickly the convention center entrance lobby that was there. It's a very beautiful space that I have been to many times and it really it's big, and the show filled it up pretty much, didn't it?

01:46 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
It did. You know this is what I would call a small mid high. Let me go back. A small mid high. Small show Figure about 22,000 attendees. Small show figure about 22 000 attendees. But because of the nature of the demo rooms that we're talking about in the last episode, it does, you know, take up a lot of floor space. There weren't many big, big booths, but there were a lot of booths, because the things that we're not talking about here, which a lot of the people go for, are things like crest, one of the biggest booths, or all the bits and pieces that a company needs to put together not just a home theater but a total integrated residential environment. Those companies were all there.

02:36 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, right, and some of them are huge.

02:38 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Crestron.

02:39 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Correct. For example Crestron, which makes control systems for not only home theater, but also everything.

02:49 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
If you see a podium at an event and there's somebody clicking something, there's probably a Crestron in there.

02:54 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, yeah, okay, but we're going to talk about video products today. Oh, but we have to, you have to. We have to Sorry, you have to, you have to, we have to Sorry. But one of the biggest announcements, I think, was from Epson, who is famous for their LCD projectors and for the most part they have been aiming at the mid to lower end of the price spectrum, yep, but at this show they went big. They showed three new projectors in the Q series, all of which use a laser light source. They're 4K resolution, with pixel shifting or pixel wiggling, as sometimes we say. Did you get a chance to see these, mike?

03:47 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Yes, I did, and they were actually pretty good. And even the one that's over on the far right, which is the that looks like a classroom projector Just picture that turned upside down pointing at a whiteboard near almost every classroom in the country. I did see them and they were quite good. Good and they were in a high ambient light environment.

04:11 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Well, which makes sense because they are super bright. The lowest end one, the QL3000, is the mid-range and that's at 6,000 lumens for $15,000, not including the lens well, but that's not atypical in the Cedia world.

04:37 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Because you want to, you're given a room and you want to make sure that you can fill the screen, but you want to be able to put the projector where you want, to fit the screen size that you need. And there's a lot of lens shifting, but not the kind of lens shift that you usually talk about right, right, um, also.

04:58 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Uh, then at the high end, let me bring up my notes here, the the QL7000. That was bright, 10,000 lumens, yep man, and the price $30,000 without a lens.

05:15 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Which puts it in the same category and I know we'll talk about it shortly as the JVCs.

05:20 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yes, exactly so. It's not uncommon in the Cedia world, but it is uncommon for Epson.

05:28 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Well, and in the more consumer-driven, diy-ish kind of world, the reality is, if you're going to spend $15,000 or $30,000 more on a projector, you're going to have somebody. If you can afford that projector, you can have somebody come and put it in for you and in fact you probably especially if you have to pick the right lens. You want to make sure that you're putting the right tires on your car, or it's not going to go very far and work very well.

05:57 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, Okay. Another company that introduced some new projectors was Sony. We mentioned this in the last episode the Bravia 9 and Bravia 8.

06:11 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
And the Bravia 9, coincidentally, is $32,000. $32,000. Now that happened and so they're creating sort of a new not a new category. But clearly if you've got three big companies putting new products in that price band, they're not doing it just to hope that it catches some buyers. There was some research that was done, so I think that that indicates the health of that segment of the market.

06:44 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, right, exactly so. And the other company that is big in that market is JVC. Yes, they announced four new models in May, so these aren't new at the show, but they're the first new models from jvc in two years.

07:03 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Uh, they're laser illuminated, 8k, with pixel shifting and they're dila, which is is interesting because you've got lcd in the epsons, laser illuminated.

07:15 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
You've got sxrd in the sonys, which is the same thing as dila or a variation of uh same technology same technology as light uh.

07:27 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Liquid crystal uh some damn thing or another reflective, so yes, they're? They're little baby mirrors, but it's a liquid crystal type of thing. Right and um, the didila which, going way back to the beginning of uh, a solid state uh projection as opposed to crts that was one of the original technologies at dila right, which they've improved dramatically dramatically, yeah so so they've got these new projectors and I didn't get the pricing on them. One of them is about $30,000, so there you go.

08:08 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
So there you go Again. We're in the $30,000 range.

08:11 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
But there's two interesting things in the notes that we were talking about before we went on the air here. It was interesting that one of them is native 4K, without pixel shift, and that is a distinct differentiation still between that and the LCDs that Epson is using. Not doing a good or bad judgment, just a statement of fact. The Sonys and the JVCs are native, the Epsons are not, but they also have the 8k pixel shift, which it was good and it was. It was damn bright, I mean, it was, it was really good and augmented by the fact that the audio, as we mentioned previously in that room, was uh by our friend, uh, anthony gromani, so it was pretty good. But there's one interesting thing, two, two interesting things that you note about the JVCs. The projectors have filmmaker mode and for those of you who I'm sure you've talked about filmmaker mode, why would Barry Sonnenfeld like filmmaker mode?

09:13 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Because it turns off motion interpolation Bingo.

09:17 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
And all the other quote, unquote enhancements actually ruin the picture don't be here to help me, let me turn it off and that's what filmmaker mode. But the other interesting thing that caught my eye was the 48 gig hdmi, which is the upper range of hdmi, and in other parts of my life I'm involved in configuring some products now that will have HDMI 2.1. And one of the people that I met, you know off of the journalism track at Cedia, was one of the companies that makes the chips that most of the AVRs use, particularly if there's anything other than a one-in, one-out, are going to be 40, not 48.

10:08 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
And Sony projectors have long been 40 gigabits per second. We're talking about this bit rate or bandwidth of the data going down the HDMI cable. Hdmi 2.0 maxes out at 18 gigabits per second. Hdmi 2.1 maxes out at 48 gigabits per second, but a lot of companies, mike, as you just mentioned, use chips that only go to 40.

10:41 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
And nobody will know the difference.

10:43 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Nobody will know the difference.

10:44 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Because there are no sources.

10:46 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right that require 48.

10:50 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
The only person that would know is Joe Cain, because he wants 444, 24-bit or whatever.

10:55 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, right right.

10:56 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
But there is no source material for that, although it is worth mentioning. Just as we were putting this show together, sony announced the PlayStation 5 Pro, which does have 8K support, but I don't know if it's 40 or 48.

11:14 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Okay. Well, this is a little note, a little lesson in HDMI bandwidth. This is a little note, a little lesson in HDMI bandwidth. The last front projector that I want to mention is the Barco Heimdall, which is their attempt to do a home cinema projector. They're mostly in commercial cinema projectors. This is a single DLP 4K with no pixel shifting red, green and blue lasers that alternate, shining onto the one DLP chip, 6,000 lumens. It does virtually 100% of the BT.2020 color space, which is really really good.

11:59 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Because a lot of the other ones are just P3.

12:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Correct, which is a smaller color space, which is really really good, because a lot of the other ones are just p3, correct, which is a smaller color space, still larger than hdtv, but anyway, and the cost?

12:10 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
only sixty thousand dollars so here's the question if you were putting together, if you were an installer, and then this is what those folk do, and I was was going to say guys, but there are some very good installation firms run by women, and some of them would come up and slap me if I kept saying Cedia, guys. But here's a projector, this Barker Chemdel, which is 60 grand 6,000 lumens. Well, I can get 6,000 lumens for 15 grand, or 10,000 lumens for 30 grand from Epson and similarly from JVC and Sony.

12:54
So you have to look at the specs and you say is having an RGB laser something that you want? Ok, there's something to be said for that. Uh, do you need? Uh, bt 2020? Is it gonna make a difference? And that's one of the things that you know, I, I am involved with through cd education what's the right? And the people that are watching this, I, I would suspect, are more people that are into doing it themselves, which is great, which, just because it's more expensive and it has more stuff, it's better. But is it better for the application?

13:29 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, right, or is it twice as much better?

13:34 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Where's the point of diminishing returns, correct?

13:38 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Exactly so. Ok, then let's take a look at a few ultra short throw projectors. These are the projectors that you place right up against the wall and it shoots at a very steep angle up onto the wall and the image then appears, hopefully, on a screen on the wall. You don't want to just shoot onto the wall because that's going to look loud.

13:58 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
And sometimes an ALR screen. You don't want to just shoot onto the wall because that's going to look loud and sometimes an ALR screen.

14:01 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
It has to be an ALR screen and a screen that specifically takes light in from a steep angle and reflects it back out, perpendicular to the wall, out into the audience. So Hisense had their laser TV. Was that new at the show, do you know?

14:22 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
I don't know they they were. It was strange. That was sort of a small booth and I cropped this image down. I should have showed the whole thing. This wasn't a big booth and it was in the open floor and it had a little hood over it and you could see. You know, for some light control and but note that it was 8K. I think that may have been at CES, but I wouldn't say that for certainty. But for what it was and for how I was viewing it there, it was a good picture. There's no question about it.

14:54 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Another thing about UST projectors is that they are often especially with an ambient light rejecting screen. They're good in ambient light environments, so in your living room.

15:06 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Because you're right up on top of it. Because you're right up on top of it, or the projector is right on top of the screen.

15:11 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah or right below it. Yeah right, samsung had their Premiere series. I don't think that was new either, though.

15:19 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
No, the two new Samsungs, I believe, were new.

15:21 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Oh, they were. Yeah, Okay, the Premiere 7,. I don't have a picture of it, unfortunately.

15:28 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Again this was one of the things that you asked me before about the show, and things are getting better to the point where it's harder to say sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. That one was really good, that's the one you got to buy. There wasn't as much of that as there was in the past, because everything is getting better. The rising tide has indeed raised all projectors.

15:59 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Including USD projectors, to be sure. Okay, let's see. Oh, the one USD projector that I wanted to mention and we do have a picture of that is the AWOL A-W-O-L.

16:14 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
The guys with the weirdest name in this category.

16:18 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right Called the Vision Vanish name in this category. Right called the vision vanish. Now this is actually their ltv 3500 pro ultra short throw projector sitting in an enclosure, and this is a. What we're seeing here is a a promo shot from them. It's it's this big, giant enclosure that sits on your floor and, in addition to the projector that is sitting in the middle of this enclosure, it actually motorizes out a little bit. When you turn it on, the screen rolls up from the enclosure and forms this screen.

16:57 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
They've been showing that, not technology, that approach they've been I think that is almost a wall signature that they've been showing that uh approach to the screen that rolls down into an enclosure, um, for quite a number of years and they've staked out a pretty good space in the market for that and the products are good and it's something where, again, this is something that sort of crosses over between is it a DIY-ish thing or is it a thing for a professional, because you know you can take it off the truck and unpack it and you don't have to worry about the screen because the screen's there. So it's a very clever approach and they have, to their credit, made quite a thing over the past few years that they have really improved the optical path and the quality of the optics and all the components that go into that. So you know, it may be a brand that people haven't heard of, but they've established themselves quite favorably in the market.

18:06 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, yeah, you can buy this thing with a 100-inch or 120-inch diagonal screen for $15,000 or $16,000, respectively. Yep, yep. And it has a built-in audio system with a 5.1 wireless speaker system that uses the speaker in the enclosure itself as a center channel. It's pretty cool.

18:28 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
But the way they displayed it on the floor. It was sort of in a lower light area of the floor, but it was the kind of thing where you could do. What was it, grandpa Simpson in the old THX trailer? Turn it up. You couldn't do that they wouldn't let you do it. I didn't have the ability to. I saw it and it looked good, but I can't comment on the audio just because of where it was sited and the inability to turn it up.

18:57 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, right, okay, moving on to what we often call micro LED or DV LED, or what you have now started calling hard screen, as a category as a category, uh, but but micro led? Are these panels that you put together, tiles that you put together into very large screens, quantum media systems? We talked about that in the last episode. They have their xdr pro cinema video wall. It was in several booths at the show, right?

19:29 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
I was just in one or two well, they had.

19:32 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
they had an 18-footer in Kaleidoscape booth and a 20-footer in their big demo and I think they said I read that they had a 10-footer in their own booth.

19:44 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
It was really good it's really good.

19:46
It's really good and that's just one of those no hands down. But, in fairness, planar was there and Planar if anybody watched NBC's Olympics coverage all of the direct view LED screens that they used behind not only the people that were in Paris, but the people that were in Stanford yeah, I saw the Olympics, but I anchored it from Stanford, connecticut. All of those guys, the screens behind them, were all from Planar and they're very big in the broadcast world. Sony was there, planar was there. I've seen you Digital projection. That's sort of being strange that they're also in the direct view LED business, as is Christie and Barco, but the ones that were big up, oh, and I'll get slapped by the PR guys and, lest we forget, lg and Samsung.

20:36 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Oh, of course they also have their direct view.

20:40 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
And Samsung showed they hinted at this and I think they did show it at CES an 88-inch direct view LED.

20:51 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yes.

20:51 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Which is you usually think of these things. The wall, which is their sort of trade name for their direct-view LED products, are typically for 4K, 146 inches, because, remember, the resolution depends on how many modules you have. Right, and it's not like a projector can be any size and the resolution is determined, or a projection screen can be any size and the resolution is determined, or projection screen can be any size and the resolution is determined by the projector. That's not the same with the retreview led right, um, but they did show a, an 88, but like you still can't afford it, I, I can't afford it, it's, it's still a hundred hundred thousand dollars right and and that's cool, but that's a technology um, that is very big but it's not consumer ready and it is worth noting at this juncture the difference between micro and mini.

21:45
Yeah, and the direct view, leds are micro micro leds because Because they're teeny, tiny, they're super tiny. Super, duper, duper, tiny and mini LED, which is what you'll typically find as the backlight array, the BLU backlight unit for flat screen TVs.

22:03 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
For flat screen LCD TVs.

22:06 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
And because they're not LED, can I? They're not LED TVs.

22:11 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Don't say that.

22:11 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
They're LCD LED TVs. Don't say that they're LCD TVs with an LED backlight.

22:16 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I have to say I rail about this all the time.

22:21 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Okay, so you're not going to edit that out, because that just drives me bonkers, but the mini LEDs are indeed minier than a regular LED, which means you can have more of them, and the more of them that you can. That gives you more dimming zones, fald zones, so that's important. They're just not as small and that means you can also have more of them. They're brighter, and the evidence of that at the show was the TCL 115-inch flat panel display which was at CES, to be sure, but it is interesting. It's a 115-inch TV for crying out loud. That's something for what you would call the CD of the custom market. For the first time, tcl was on the floor with a fairly large presence in Denver, and the set looked really, really, really good.

23:15 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I remember when Panasonic first came out with a 102-inch Plasma.

23:21 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Plasma yes.

23:23 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
And people were saying, oh, you've got to build the house around it, how do you get it into the house?

23:27 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Well, but you know, it bends in the middle.

23:30 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Only once, once You've heard that before. Yes, I have.

23:35 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
But they sold an enormous number of those because at that point in time there was no other way to get a high brightness display. And they think I know they sold as many for commercial applications than they did for consumer, because lobbies and transportation terminal and all of that and and that was the you know, the forerunner of now the 115 okay, that's sort of an outlier. But sony and lg and samsung all have 97 or 98 inch lc right Backlit micro LED, backlit LEDs and they sell that is a fave in the CD world and OLED and OLED. Lest I forget, oled was there and the Sony award winning from the blah blah off you know worldwide video thing, they were there and LG's booth was all oled, all oled.

24:37 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
so that's still very viable yeah, now there's one thing I wanted to mention here. We were talking about quantum um and they you you mentioned this in the last episode and I just wanted to bring it up again they were talking about brightness in commercial cinema and you took a picture of this thing that I thought was cool, so let's take a look at that. So give us what we got here.

25:01 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
So you've got SDR 48 nits and again, I did not make this up, this is quantum slide. So that's what you see on the screen at an AMC or a Regal or an IMAX, because you can only push so much light in a big theatrical auditorium room.

25:19 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right With a 30 or 40 foot screen.

25:21 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Right EDR extended definition to dynamic range. I haven't heard that before, but okay. But that's Dolby Vision, which you'll see at a Dolby Vision AMC or when we used to go to the TV Academy where they had the Christie projectors. That's Dolby Vision 108 nits. But now the standards have been changed so that you can do DCP at 300 nits HDR. But don't tell Barry Sonnenfeld.

25:53 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Because of sex.

25:55 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
I'm honest to goodness, he could be Larry David. It's really strange, but you know, but he's now. Quantum is the only one who does that, but you can see. And okay, fine, this is their promo slide, but it shows the difference that you get as you get HDRdr.

26:13 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Sorry, barry yeah, I'm not with barry on this one. I'm totally in with hdr. I, I love it, I love the way it looks and I I can't wait to see a 300 nit cinema presentation well, they are putting one I, I think, in red, which, by the way, bought.

26:37 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Whose camera business did they buy? No, nikon bought red. But in one of the screening rooms in LA they're going to put in a quantum media wall, oh man, and they're going to do a press briefing on it, and you can bet that I, you know You'll be there. I wrote my name and address on the arm of the PR lady. You better invite me, okay.

27:07 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
A couple other video products that weren't displays that we want to talk about. A couple other video products that weren't displays that we want to talk about. Kaleidoscape recently introduced their new Strato V movie server, which is similar to their other movie server Strato C, I think, and basically this is what they're calling a lower cost Kaleidoscape server. It has enough storage in it, local storage within it for 10 4K movies, but if you're only going to store 10 movies, what are you getting that for?

27:45 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Now you can add on more storage.

27:47 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
You can add on a lot more storage.

27:50 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
And they were talking about people buying these things with terabytes or petabytes of storage. I mean every movie ever made. But again, that's the nature of the constituency at Cedia.

28:03 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
And there are people that have those. Right. In this case, though, the Strato V is under $4,000, which is probably half the cost of their other server models, so they're trying to aim a little lower.

28:19 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
But what they point to, and as did in all of the big demos, that the way they have things mastered and packaged and put together is that the audio and video is really good. And I come from an era where I used to do CRT projector demos I won't tell you how many years ago and playing. We were glad to have DVDs, but now everybody was using Kaleidoscapes except for Synthesis and Trinov and Quantum when they played stuff off a DCP server.

28:52 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, and we should say that Kaleidoscape, for those who might not be familiar with it, is a movie server. You buy a movie, you download it into either this Strato V or, more likely, a Terra server, which will have terabytes of storage. Yep, you download the movie into it and you've bought it. It's like a Blu-ray or something and you can play it on your system and it's much higher quality than any streaming. Right, right, right. So that's a good thing, but they're trying to aim a little lower in the price point.

29:31 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Right. So I mean, how are people watching movies these days?

29:36 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Mostly streaming.

29:37 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
There you go. I still have my Oppo.

29:41 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
So do I. So do I. And speaking of Oppo Ultra HD Blu-ray player, what might be called a universal disc player, another player that has recently appeared on the market and was there at the show is Magnitar. They have UDP 800 and UDP 900.

30:04 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
they have and udp 800 and udp 900, and here you took a picture of it with, with, uh, some of the guts showing, yeah, and you know it ain't cheap. But if you want a true high-end audio and video physical media player, this is really, you know, the only thing in that space right now and it's got a separate over in the right. It's kind of hard to see. Sorry, I thought I sent a top-down shot, but on the right-hand side, where you see those two big caps, that whole side is all the two-channel audio output with a separate DAC, with an ESS9038, which is ESS's top-line DAC story for another show and then in the middle they have the multi-channel output and the isolated power supply over on the other side, and Sony they're probably the only ones that make a good laser sled for that. So I mean, this is one of those, as back in the day, curtis Mathis, anybody remember that?

31:02 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I do.

31:03 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Their advertising slogan was most expensive TV set in the world and damn proud of it Damn. Well worth it, damn well worth it, I think, was the phrase Damn well worth it, and especially if you want something with a lot of wood and a 21-inch CRT too. But this was expensive and damn well worth it. And they have sold quite. I spoke to Thel. They've sold quite a few of them.

31:25 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
The lower end, udp800, is $1,600. And the flagship, udp900, is $3,000. So they're hoping, and I'm hoping too, that physical optical discs aren't dead yet.

31:40 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Well, you know, reports of optical discs' death are greatly exaggerated. It is worth noting that they did go back and reprint the Oppenheimer Ultra HD Blu-ray twice, really, so they sold a lot of them.

31:56 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Oh, wow, okay, so people are still buying them.

31:59 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
For the guy that shot it on 70 millimeter IMAX and I don't know if you've talked about this at all, but I can't help but mentioning that when they played it in the TCL theater in Hollywood, or what used to be called Hollywood and Ireland, they had to expand the projection booth because the platter to fit the movie for three hours.

32:23 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
they had to build an extension to the projection booth For the film platter the platter of actual physical film.

32:32 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
And because he's, as Barry Sonnenfeld said, because he's Christopher Nolan and he can do whatever he wants, like not do any automatic dot ADR, and that's why nobody could understand the damn dialogue.

32:45 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Well, that's a whole, nother episode of Home Theater Geeks.

32:47 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
But they made had to make for him because it had never been made before 70 millimeter for IMAX perf black and white film.

32:58 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Wow.

33:00 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
So he is that much of a purist I apologize for going off topic, but he is that much of a purist that he didn't want to shoot the scenes. He wanted a black and white in color and then grade them out down to black and white. He had enough pull that he got somebody probably whoever is Kodak now to make 35, 65 millimeter black and whitemm black and white film.

33:20 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Black and white film.

33:23 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Because he can.

33:24 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Because he can.

33:25 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
And he did.

33:26 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Okay, two last products here, both of them video processors and again both of them aiming at a somewhat lower price point than people are used to.

33:36 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
I was really surprised when I saw the prices for these things.

33:38 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, the Lumagen Radiance Pro 4140. Yep, it's a video processor used by a lot of different people. This one is $5,500. They're usually probably twice that, I don't remember exactly, but they're a lot more expensive than that. So this one is is aiming at a lower price, and the other one is the mad vr envy core. Yeah, uh, which this picture was taken, uh, by eric wesley at uh audio video at avs forum. Uh, and that's six thousand bucks. So that's certainly half of what a mad VR processor normally costs.

34:20 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
And they both looked good. And just for historical comparison, my friend Rich Green, who received the Lifetime Achievement Award this year, in the little intro reel. You know, hi, I'm Rich Green, blah, blah blah and he's, I've been in this business so long and he reaches over and he pulls up a ferrugia line doubler and but?

34:44
but I bring that up to say, if you remember when and I do what a ferrugia line doubler cost and what it did, and we thought that was the greatest thing in the universe yep and compare it, albeit 40 years later, to, um you know, to a lumagen or a mad vr, you know we've got, we've come a long way we've come an awfully long way, yeah, and, as I often say, digital technology starts off expensive and end ends up being cheaper if it's popular enough and or, and I don't remember what a Ferruccio line doubler cost.

35:20 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Oh, it was five figures easy.

35:23 - Mike Heiss (Guest)
Okay, so there you go. What did the old line doubler? At one point they actually had a line quadrupler. What did those cost the Lumigins for getting today's money versus their then money? But it has the same sticker price. But look what you're getting, cowabunga.

35:42 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Tremendously much more, just infinitely more almost. So yeah, it's pretty amazing, but we digress.

35:50
We digress. And here we are, though, at the end of this episode, which is part two of our three-part coverage of Cedia. I do hope you will tune in next week for part three, when we talk about audio products. So once again, mike, thanks so much for being here. My pleasure, and we'll see you next time. As always, if you have a question for me, please send it along to htg at twittv. I love answering those questions on the show and we thank you for your support of the Twit Network with your membership in Club Twit, which gives you access to all the Club Twit, the Twit Network, shows and in their video form, so you can check out all the cool graphics that are shown on this show and all the others. So we hope you will consider joining out all the cool graphics that are shown on this show and all the others. So, um, we hope you will consider joining. Until next time, geek out.