Digital Projection

[JPlomley]

Folks, I really need some help on this one. I have been asked by two of the local camera clubs to give a presentation on LF photography. I'm pretty excited about doing so, however I am going to need a digital projector. All of my LF negs and chromes have been scanned on either Imacon 949, Creo iQ3 or Cezanne elite, so the quality of the input material is good, but anything I have seen projected digitally has left me underwhelmed (especially having used Leica Pradovit RTm projectors when I was shooting 35mm). Any suggestions on brands and specs I should be looking for? Am I better just to take my scanned images and have them output to 35mm slides and continue to project with my Leica? Would the quality from a film recorder be better than a digitally projected image?

Thanks,
Jeff

[Bruce Watson]

Folks, I really need some help on this one. I have been asked by two of the local camera clubs to give a presentation on LF photography. I'm pretty excited about doing so, however I am going to need a digital projector. All of my LF negs and chromes have been scanned on either Imacon 949, Creo iQ3 or Cezanne elite, so the quality of the input material is good, but anything I have seen projected digitally has left me underwhelmed (especially having used Leica Pradovit RTm projectors when I was shooting 35mm). Any suggestions on brands and specs I should be looking for? Am I better just to take my scanned images and have them output to 35mm slides and continue to project with my Leica? Would the quality from a film recorder be better than a digitally projected image?

Thanks,
Jeff

What's wrong with just taking along some prints? In particular, large prints that really show off what LF can do. Let the quality of the prints speak for themselves.

As for the rest of the talk, 35mm slides work fine. And I suspect that the quality from a film recorder would indeed by better than a digitally projected image. But I'm only speculating.

[JPlomley]

Cheers Bruce. Prints are indeed part of the plan as well as a lightbox display of chromes. For concepts of tilt and swing, I wanted to demonstrate with actual images, and was also planning on a show of landscape imagery set to music. I just found a company named Gammatech that does 4K film recording so I am going to give them a try on a couple of files.

[Walter Calahan]

One thing that will help is to convert copies of the digital files you plan use in your talk to the color space of the projector.

I give talks to camera clubs and schools all the time. I've never had any of my work projected as they original looked. The main thing for me is that the audience hears, sees and learns ends up helping them advance as photographers. I let go of perfect color fidelity.

That said, many of the very expensive, high end digital projects for use in large convention halls hold the original values of your images, but like anything, you've got to pay through the nose for it.

If you can find a shop to make dupe 35 mm images of you LF work that meets you quality demands, then do it.

Me, I'd let it go. The best shop for making dupes near where I live closed their doors two years ago. Many time dupe slides look worse than how digital projectors render our files.

I just gave a talk on George Bellows' paintings last night to a graduate class studying American Fine Art. The color on the white wall was not correct even though the classroom had a high end Epson projector. The images looked nothing like what was up on my Apple MacBook Pro. As a test after the lecture, I then went downstairs to another classroom, hooked into the same Epson projector, and projected the images on a pulled down screen. The images look far better.

Personally I would NOT spend the money on making dupes for two talks. The audience will get more out of the talk if your words inspire them then if the colors are perfectly accurate.

[Walter Calahan]

And about music.

Be careful. If the audience doesn't like your musical selection, you'll turn them off.

Prints are nice to show if the lighting is good and the audience is small. Stand twenty feet from a light box display to make sure your audience can see the image. If you can't discern your image, your audience won't either.

[Brian Ellis]

Unless the camera club is very small you'll want to use projections, not prints. The club I belong to has about 75 members at each meeting and only the people in the first couple rows can really see prints. We just bought a digital projector to replace the one we've been using for a couple years. We paid about $1200 for it plus another hundred or so for some accessories. I don't know anything about it but if you're thinking of buying something in this price range I can find out the brand and provide other basic information. It does a great job, the things I've shown have looked exactly like they looked on my monitor. I do know that the people involved with it have spent a lot of time on calibration.

Having said all that, we've had a few people make presentations with a slide projector and that worked well too but they had to bring all their own equipment, the club doesn't have any slide gear any more.

[George Stewart]

If money were no object I'd recommend the Canon REALiS WUX10. It projects 1200x1920 and has auto everything (focus, color correction, keystone correction) - just press a button and it is ready to go. From about 10-feet back, with a 100-inch projection, one cannot resolve the pixels.

That said, the Canon 1050x1400 projectors are nice also. I have not investigated the DLP models.

[pherold]

We did some extensive testing of projectors here a year ago. I am not at liberty to divulge brands, but I have a few general hints that may be useful.

Every projector has different preset "modes" that are intended for different viewing environments. These modes have a direct relationship to the size of the color gamut. If you select a "movie" or "theater" mode, you will get the largest gamut and the most saturation out of the projector. Oftentimes, this greater gamut comes at the cost of brightness. Modes like PC or Presentation give a smaller gamut, but are also brighter.

In most cases you should stay away from DLP projectors as they will be bright, but at an extreme loss of color gamut.

Once you have the projector mode set to be able to produce the most color, you might also be able to create a profile for it. If you have a ColorMunki, or an i1 Pro with a beamer software module, these will make projector profiles. It is also possible to make a projector profile using an ordinary colorimeter. Ideally, this profiling should be done using the same screen you will be projecting on.

[8x10 user]

Another option would be to have medium format slides made on a quality film recorder.