Cypress, Calif. – (February 12, 2015) – Christie® helped the Science Museum of Virginia create a state-of-the-art planetarium that is taking patrons across the planet and deep into the universe. Audiences are seeing it all in high resolution at 120 Hz thanks to Christie D4K2560 high frame rate projectors, which were installed by Evans & Sutherland (E&S), a pioneer in computer graphics and digital dome theater systems.
The projectors power an 8K-resolution full dome system with the sharpest and brightest images ever seen on the 76-foot Dome screen, one of the largest digital dome theaters in the world. Audiences are spellbound when they see the high-energy 2D and 3D movies, as well as innovative astronomy shows featuring E&S’s proprietary Digistar 5 system.
Making the journey from film to digital with Christie
“The fact that the Christie D4K2560 projectors with 120 Hertz and 25,000 lumens of brightness became available at the perfect time meant we could offer a cutting edge digital dome projection system to the museum. These new projectors provide them a solution that has the brightness on the dome that would equal or surpass what they were getting out of their film projector,” said Dennis Elkin, Director of Advanced Displays, Evans & Sutherland. “And with our proprietary auto blending and auto alignment systems, we are able to perfectly blend the five projectors into a uniform image across the dome. Color and dark state uniformity makes a lot of difference – especially in the dark parts of a presentation. It is critical to have the right black level for the sky in a dome or planetarium and the Christie projectors provide that.”
Aware of the dome’s 30-degree tilt, Evans & Sutherland installed three Christie projectors in the back of the dome inside the projection booth, cross-shooting two of them. Another two Christie projectors were installed in the front of the dome, cross-shooting to the back. Using E&S’s auto-alignment and auto-blending, all the images were perfectly blended and “stitched together,” resulting in a seamless image throughout the entire dome surface, which was recently re-skinned by Spitz, an E&S subsidiary.
“With a film projector that physically loads frames into the projection gate 24 times