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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Valueman who wrote (32666)	6/27/1999 3:57:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

CineComm qualcomm.com Take Two [the first attempt was eaten in cyberspace]. A week ago, I went to see The Phantom Menace, one of the Star Wars series, at Pacific Theatres on Winnetka [an aptly named street] in Los Angeles. It was the 1.45pm session on a Tuesday when school wasn't out, so it wasn't too crowded. In fact, it was not even half full, and the first showing of the digital version was only on the previous Friday. At 5.30pm the night before the premiere, only half the seats had been sold, so we can conclude that the technology itself wasn't sufficient to bring people out in droves, even though it was a famous movie premiere of the digital CineComm technology = yawn! Indeed, there were only two maniacs running around at the back of the theatre when the credits were running, peering into the projection room to see how it worked. How it worked was they have a big metal box, about a metre high, the best part of a metre wide and going on two metres long, with 3 primary colour lenses, each a couple of inches diameter, on the front, stuck on by duct tape by the look of it. Though the tape might have been to hold the box together. Then again, it could have been to block light shining out from a crack in the box. There was a big pipe about 20 or 30 cm diameter leading from the top of the box and I guess that was to cool the works. So it is a real piece of engineering which they don't deliver in a brief case. The movie was really good quality. The other maniac said that he'd seen the film version too and this was much better. From my uneducated eye, it looked very good. When the camera panned across, there was some instability, which always happens anyway, so maybe that was just a result of the original filming of the movie, which was done on film rather than digitally. I did think the guy with the red and black tattoos on his face was a real meanie, stabbing the good guy Jedi Knight with his light sabre then getting the other Jedi Knight hanging on by his finger tips down a huge hole and sneering as the still alive Jedi Knight lost his light sabre down the hole. But what a surprise the meanie got when the finger-tip Jedi Knight will-powered the dead Jedi's light sabre down into the hole and he grabbed it and jumped up, doing some somersaults to show how cool he is, then fighting and beating and chucking the bad guy down the huge hole. Not many people shouted at the screen. I wanted to go and peer at the pixels on the screen, but thought that management and security might pay too much attention to me. It looked okay from where I was, but I do wonder just how big the little squares of each primary colour were [I assume squares as seen on tv sets]. I suppose the pixel size is in the technical detail on the Qualcomm site. So, we can expect the crowds to continue to swarm to movies and Qualcomm to rake in another $billion from distribution charges as movie theatres around the world install these big boxes flat out. Well done Q! Mqurice PS: I think the primary colours were red, green and blue. ------------------------------------------------------------------ For ''Star Wars,'' a 35 mm film print was converted to electronic information on a digital tape, which then was transferred into an array of 18 computer hard drives. The data then went to a digital projector, which created a screen image by bouncing light off special computer chips containing more than 1 million microscopic mirrors. The drawback for such a system is the equipment cost, estimated at $80,000 to $100,000. However Robert Lemer, senior vice president of CineComm, said the company plans to supply the system for free and make money by charging exhibitors a fee per showing. He predicted that digital equipment will start going into theaters in 16 to 18 months, with ''a couple thousand'' installed within two years. ''This is the launch of digital cinema. It's the future,'' he said. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Yes, Pacific Theatres is spelled like that, not 'theaters' as used by Robert Lemer. 1 million microscopic mirrors and about 200 m2 of screen, so it's possible to calculate the pixel size [if that's how big a screen is]. Michael, re <When I was shorting Zitel, and posting about what a scam it is.I was vilified for being evil. I was hated for using "my friend" as an opener and "sure is a nice day" as a closer.> You don't have a red and black face by any chance?