Science and technology keep advancing, and the dreams of the past have all become things we now possess. Take the two examples above, the mobile phone and the private car: thirty years ago they were still a dream, yet today who would doubt that mobile phones and private cars exist? The arrival of these tools has even changed the way we live. You can drive your beloved car to the seaside, dial her mobile number, and let her, far away, listen with you to the intoxicating sound of the waves...
The only advantage of the "bus": speed!
When it comes to watching a film, the public's first reaction today is still to go to the cinema. If you look at it from the angle of being first to see something and getting an early taste, the cinema is the best choice, because every film is released in cinemas first and only afterwards comes out for online viewing, on DVD, on Blu-ray and so on. So for the blockbusters I simply cannot resist, I too will go to the cinema for an early taste, and then, once the Blu-ray is out, enjoy them on a good private cinema system.
The "bus" is built to ordinary hardware standards
A bus is built to the standards of the general public, so everything is simply good enough. Just look: how many countries run their bus services on Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs? On top of that, investors put their money in from the standpoint of commercial return, so they will not invest too much in projection hardware, because hardware spending aimed at true enthusiasts really is a "waste" as far as the general public is concerned, and it is hard for investors to recoup the return. Investing in a cinema is, after all, a business.
In our country, cinemas do have a five-star certification standard, but this so-called star rating is highly unreliable when it comes to picture quality and sound quality. Open the white paper "Classification and Assessment of Cinema Star Ratings, GB/T 21048-2007" and you find that the five-star rating was never aimed specifically at sound and picture quality; it is mostly about ancillary facilities, such as seat width, an on-site restaurant, parking spaces and so on. The requirements that one-star and five-star cinemas must meet for picture and sound are the same, and that is why many cinemas that hold the five-star certification do not actually perform well: you often see blurry pictures, grey and murky images with no clarity, and insufficient brightness; unbalanced sound, obvious standing waves, harsh treble, insufficient bass, no surround sound, and so on. Even the most advanced Dolby Atmos system in cinemas today cannot escape a mediocre result. Never mind the hardware investment: the lack of a dedicated Atmos soundtrack is a major failing in itself (I am not greedy; getting 7.1 right would already be no small feat!). Relying only on the Atmos processor's post-processing simulation, the effect simply does not come through, while ticket prices are pushed up. It really is a thankless effort.
The quality of the "bus" passengers leaves something to be desired
When I watch a film in a cinema, what I hate most is the people next to me loudly commenting on the film or taking phone calls, as if they were in their own home, with no sense of public courtesy at all! And I hate those who sit with their legs crossed and keep kicking my seat, who do not even notice when I turn round and glare at them! What is more, our country has no film rating system and a limited import quota, so many excellent films never get imported and released, and the range of films that reach the screen is very narrow.
For me, going to the cinema is a reluctant compromise
Many clients and friends, after experiencing our private cinema, say in surprise: "It is so much better than the cinema!" And I say: "The cinema is a bus; a private cinema is a private car." The cinema is like a bus, built to the standard of the general public. In an age without private cars, having a bus to ride was already a great happiness. Nowadays, owning a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz is quite ordinary, and even a Rolls-Royce or a Ferrari is nothing rare. Apart from absolute power, space and passenger capacity, in what way is a private car like that worse than a bus?
In 2009 I took part in writing and publishing "Domestic Cinemas Are Really Bad", which won agreement from a good many readers. Looking at things today, it seems the cinemas' "bad" state is still going on... They were buses to begin with, so do not expect too much of a bus!
1. Projectors
When the subject turns to cinemas, many friends will say that a cinema in a first-tier city represents an investment in the tens of millions, so how could it be inferior to a home theater? True, a cinema's digital projector is not cheap. Take the Barco DP4K-23B in the home of Mr. Zhou of Qihoo 360: its price in China would buy you an Audi A8L. But is such an expensive projector perfect? The answer is no. These commercial projectors are certainly bright enough, easily over ten thousand lumens, because they are designed to throw onto screens hundreds of inches across, but they all share one fatal weakness: the contrast ratio is too low. Two thousand to one is typical, and this means that in dark scenes the picture turns grey, loses its clarity, and the shadows never go truly black; it looks dirty. Remember that film is an art of light and shadow, and the great majority of scenes contain many dark elements, so insufficient contrast is a glaring flaw. With films like Batman, the black levels are simply painful to watch. Today's home cinema projectors, by contrast, have excellent contrast ratios, easily exceeding tens of thousands to one; as long as your viewing room is properly blacked out, with no reflected ambient light, the blacks will be absolutely deep and lustrous.
As LED technology keeps developing, projectors that use LEDs in place of lamps have gradually come to market, such as Optoma's latest flagship, the HD91. Its LED light source has a service life of twenty thousand hours; at five hours of use a day, that is more than ten years! So there is no need at all to worry about lamp life; you can simply use it like a television.
2. Screens
To save money, cinemas usually do not use projectors of very high brightness (brightness is proportional to price), yet the brightness has to be brought up, so they generally use metallic screens or high-gain screens, whose gain is 1.8 or more. This produces obvious graininess and the "hot spot" effect, and the viewing angle suffers. Just look carefully at a light-coloured area of the picture on such a screen, such as white clouds in a blue sky, and the grain is easy to see, like looking at things through a window screen. This is one of the problems a high-gain screen cannot solve. The hot spot effect means the centre of the screen is bright while brightness falls off towards the edges, which is the loss of viewing angle caused by a high-gain screen.
The choice of screens for the home is far richer. If you find a good home theater designer, he will pick out the screen type that suits you best according to your viewing environment, your budget and your preferences. In an ordinary living-room theater, for instance, where light control cannot be made very good, a light grey screen brings more benefits: it can push the black level down and raise the contrast. In a fully darkened, purpose-built viewing room, on the other hand, a high-quality white screen can reproduce the D65 colour temperature accurately, and combined with a high-quality home cinema projector the picture has the edge over a commercial cinema. Its only shortcoming is that it is not as large as a cinema screen, but does large necessarily mean high quality?
3. Speakers and Power Amplifiers
I watched the Oscar-winning animated feature Frozen at the China Film cinema at Shenzhen's Happy Coast. When I saw Frozen, the 2014 Academy Awards had not yet been presented, but I knew Frozen was sure to pick up a few Oscars, because the film genuinely moved me, and the song "Let It Go" was so beautiful! Indeed the whole film's score and songs are lovely. But at the time I felt miserable in that cinema, because the JBL professional speakers they used could only be described as garbage: the treble extension was very poor, dry and rough; the midrange sounded nothing like a large-diameter driver; and the bass, needless to say, fell off badly below 50 Hz, with none of that extreme low-frequency rendering below 40 Hz... Sitting in the cinema I thought: when this film comes out on Blu-ray I must watch it once more in the company's private cinema, on high-quality home cinema equipment, and properly enjoy the high-quality music in Frozen.
If you have really looked into professional sound-reinforcement speakers, you will find that they are not especially expensive and that their sound quality is even more ordinary. A sufficiently high SPL comes first; with professional gear, it is all about SPL! Many friends have asked me about this, saying, but the sound in the cinema is so full and rich! Yes, when it comes to driver diameter the cinema easily beats home speakers. In a cinema of several hundred square metres, if you are not using 15-inch or 18-inch drivers you are just torturing yourself, like hauling freight without a truck and insisting on an expensive sedan instead. But back to the question of size: is a large diameter necessarily good? A large diameter naturally gives a thicker sound, and it will make an impression on friends used to small home speakers, but if you listen carefully you will find that beyond thickness and presence there really is nothing else to praise; otherwise I would not have complained as I did about Frozen. Professional speakers and amplifiers are not bad in themselves; it is the limits of the investment. An ordinary cinema is simply "good enough", and high quality or enjoyment is out of the question entirely. If you ever get the chance to walk up to one of these speakers, do not be frightened by the noise floor it puts out! If it were run to home standards, could a cinema owner stand it? The DATASAT RS20i is a consumer version of a cinema preamplifier, with a rich set of EQ and other calibration functions. Very powerful! But does professional and powerful mean good sound? Only those who have tried it can speak with authority; I would class it as a truck rather than a sedan, and the sound is still "too professional", hard.
To find sound that has both body and rich, smooth detail, you need equipment that costs a fortune, which an ordinary commercial cinema cannot afford.
4. Calibration
Early this year, when I was calibrating the cinema of Mr. Zhou of 360, he specially hired a Barco engineer to calibrate the DP4K-23B. I watched the whole process. No wonder the picture quality in cinemas is so bad! The Barco engineer's calibration was very procedural and mechanical. Doing it to ISO standards is a good thing in itself, but the trouble is that they lack any spirit of research and exploration; they simply follow the book. They do not know D65, they are unclear about the colour gamut, they have no knowledge of colour management; they only follow the training procedure, and when there is a problem with the picture they do not know where it comes from or how to solve it. After I went through a "correct" calibration procedure, the engineer marvelled that he had never seen such a good picture in a commercial cinema... So when you see colour casts, inaccurate focus and other problems in a cinema, do not be surprised. These people are employees, not enthusiasts; as long as there is a picture and there is sound, that is fine; they genuinely do not see that anything is wrong!
Calibrating a private cinema, by contrast, is a highly exacting business: picture calibration follows ISF, and sound follows HAA, both extremely professional tasks that demand experience.
When you are racing along in a Maserati, the feeling is utterly different from sitting on a crowded bus. A bus can only carry you to your destination; enjoyment does not come into it at all. A Maserati, while taking you to your destination, also lets you enjoy speed and passion! In the same way, all you can enjoy in a cinema is a taste of the latest blockbuster, and in the course of that experience they pay no attention to the quality of the film itself. In a private cinema, the equipment and the environment are tailored to you, so what you experience is not merely watching a film but savouring the art of cinema with care!