Essential Install | Barco
Barco Residential delivers the full CinemaScope experience , banishing the dreaded black bars
Ready To Suspend Your Disbelief ?
Barco Residential plans to lead the way in providing a true CinemaScope experience in the home with new Loki 4K model .
Ever since its first stirrings in the 1920s when French inventor Henri Chrétien developed and patented his film process called Anamorphoscope , through the format ’ s true birth in the 1950s , CinemaScope had held its own as a format in an ever changing world . In the America of the 1950s , TV was eating into cinema ’ s audience . Studios and cinema owners needed a new weapon to impress audiences . Spyros P . Skouras , president of 20th Century Fox at the time , green-lighted the creation of CinemaScope movies , the first being classic sword and sandals epic , The Robe . The format was a hit , delivering an experience movie fans had simply never had before . The cinemas loved the format because it was relatively easy to move over to the new system ; all that needed to happen to the projector was to fit an anamorphic lens over the existing kit . Maintaining them and keeping alignment correct was relatively easy , as a technician was always on site . Fast forward a few decades and the modern home cinema installer can also deliver CinemaScope to clients in the same way , however anamorphic lenses are more problematic for the opposite reason to the commercial theatres of the 1950s . Many installers have often wished : would it not be great to have a projector that could just switch between formats with no extra lenses , no fuss and no need for return calibration checks ? Well they don ’ t have to wish anymore : enter the Loki CinemaScope to join the Optix and Orion models which already offer CinemaScope functionality ( with the added bonus of 4K and 5K performance on Loki ).
Loki Is Up To New Tricks !
Due to ship in April 2017 ( in the UK , Barco Residential projectors are available through and supported by Genesis Technologies ), the latest addition to the Barco CinemaScope family can natively deliver this classic format loved by many , that despite huge changes around it , has held its own when other enhanced formats like 3D have had mixed results .
The resolution of the Orion and Optix CinemaScope projectors is 2560x1080 , while Loki Cinemascope is 5120x2160 , an aspect ratio of 2.37:1 . Many modern TVs made today are described as 21:9 , but the real format is actually 64:27 which is 2.37:1 . Barco Residential asserts the only way to get the real experience , is via projection .
Most movies in commercial theaters that are released today are in 2.39:1 ( 2.40:1 ). A more commonly used term is 2.35:1 , but in truth that format has not been in use since the 1970s when the standard switched to 2.39:1 . Despite the technical differences , the CinemaScope term is used to cover all these different versions .
Important for the residential market , 4K UHD Blu-rays are released in 3840x2160 , an aspect ratio of 16:9 , however CinemaScope movies end up using only 3840x1620 pixels of that resolution for the actual picture ; the full image is still 3840x2160 , but because of the limitations of this approach , part of the image is shown as the dreaded black bars with resolution effectively
20 | December 2016