White paper reveals advantages of 4K

Movie theatres are making an historic transformation from film to digital projection.

In the digital world, pixels are replacing film grain as the basic elements of a picture. The Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) have defined two image resolution formats to release future movies, 2K and 4K, with differing pixel counts and differing capabilities of displaying picture detail.

Chris Cookson, President of Sony Pictures Digital Technologies, is a leading pioneer of 4K. Drawing on his vast experience in 4K at Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures, Cookson has produced a white paper examining the relative merits of the two cinema image standards.

2K provides an image of up to 2.2 million pixels, while 4K represents 8.8 million pixels. With new-style stadium seating in theatres, the audience now sits so close to the screen that, at 2K, they can see the pixels. In this case, only 4K does the job.

Does 4K really make a difference? [White Paper, PDF, 444 Kb]