So you may be asking "why" when you own a fantastic HT. Well here's why.. because Atlas Shrugged was playing and I wanted to gauge audience reaction.
So here's my technical reaction:
Wow.. 35mm film looks just as blurry as I remembered from the last time I watched a film, ten years ago.
It is easy to get spoiled with our XDCams, Blu-ray and 1080P projection.
I went to see Atlas Shrugged on Wednesday at a theater complex in a larger city.
The first things that hit me, compared to my home viewing experience:
1. Picture was dim.. 14 FL is not very bright, especially if you're used to 60+ FL in your home theater.
2. Picture was very soft. When we arrived, they were running some ads that appeared to be from digital sources. They looked better, about like 720P video. But when the movie previews began, the film was running. The picture got grainy and details got soft. Oh, and little scratches and dirt spots appeared here and there..
3. The picture flickers. I forgot just how annoying that flicker is!
4. The sound was honky, irritating and beaming.
While I was there, I got to enjoy inhaling the stench of a dead rat that must have found its way into the ventilation system.. much of the lobbies on the upper level and this theater were filled with the sickening stench.
When we got home, my wife wanted to watch Coraline, on DVD. So we popped it in our upscaling Oppo 83 player and the first thing that hit me was that the text of the opening credits was crisper and sharper than the text on the 35mm distro print we saw in the commercial theater hours earlier. The whole movie was quite satisfyingly sharp, even though we were sitting much closer to our screen and it was taking up a wider field of vision than where we were in the Fairfield Theaters earlier.
And forget about Blu-ray, particularly anything I shot on XDCam and authored myself--those look like 20/20 vision, not even like a proxy for the real thing.
What I'm amazed at is that movie theaters are still stuck on this ancient film technology. We're still subjected to flickering images, fuzzy images lacking in fine detail, and bandwidth-limited audio. Even a modest home theater can best what commercial theaters offer.
The theater we were in had a 20' screen (I counted ceiling tiles and their were ten across on their 24" dimension, above the screen). Even though Atlas Shrugged with made with a RED camera, the print just couldn't do it justice. Not even close. 35mm distro prints are matched by DVD through a good upscaler.
I did not expect film to look so poor after becoming used to digital cinema. But there it is.
