Now, in all fairness the problem may be their new digital remastering process that attempts to convert a standard 35mm film to the IMAX 15/70 standard. I know enough to know this will never look as good as a native 15/70 movie but what I saw was not even remotely close to good. Even on this inferiorly small screen it was grainy. This image spread across the multi-story monster at the MN zoo would have been a nightmare I reckon.

But the resolution necessary to do a digital 15/70 movie, these movies must be enormous. How could they store them? How could they distribute them? Surely the compression is high on these and perhaps that is to blame. MP3 ruined the quality of many recordings for me and I’d hate to see IMAX fall down a similar hole. Their digital audio is uncompressed but this video could never be. No format exists to store that amount of data short of multiple, multi terabyte hard drives and that would be a nightmare to distribute to theaters across the nation. I also cannot imagine what storage device would have the bandwidth to stream a resolution high enough to achieve IMAX sizes. It must be heavily compressed and that frightens me. The lack of technical details in this press release only reinforces this fear.

I’m sticking with the old IMAX at the Minnesota Zoo and I’m praying they stick with the 70mm film and not this DLP crap. It’s just not up to the standard that the IMAX brand has established and when you pay more than twice standard ticket price to go to an IMAX movie it should be nothing short of brilliant. The Rosedale 16 AMC IMAX screen was a rip off! It has permanently soiled the IMAX name in my mind. BEWARE!

And I think its “most won’t be able to tell”. Not “most want be able to tell”.