Who invented cinema projector

Today you can find everything from tiny pico projectors the size of a matchbook with a handful of lumens, up to the largest, high-resolution beast boasting up to 60 lumens. That said, most projector manufacturers have announced or demonstrated 8K resolution projectors. The future certainly looks bright! Topics: dataton , projection , slide projector , CRT projectors. By: David Aleksandersen. David Aleksandersen has extensive experience from the audiovisual industry and is an active blogger.

He has been responsible for developing and executing marketing, sales and initiatives in knowledge transfer and partner training for more than 20 years. This blog is created by Dataton , and is about multi-display software and surrounding technologies, media servers, content creation - basically anything within the AV industry that serves to enrich the audience experience!

A short history of projection By David Aleksandersen Slides step forward The era of overheads From CRT to digital Where it all started Roughly we can divide the history of projection into the following eras: Very early projection systems pre-lens projection systems Analog projection lenses and optics Digital projection high-end lenses, optics and illumination sources The history of both analog and digital projection has been heavily influenced by the development of computers.

Magic Lantern The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens is generally recognised as the true inventor of the magic lantern, a forerunner of the traditional slide-based image projector.. Episcope The episcope was invented by the Swiss mathematician, astronomer and engineer Leonhard Euler around Le Cinema!

Slides step forward Since the s, generations have been exposed to endless and tiresome slideshows, of mind-numbing vacation photos, or in history and art lessons at schools.

The era of overheads The overhead projector is built on the same principles as the 35 mm slide projector, but differs in that the transparencies slides used are much bigger, often up to A4 or US-letter size. From CRT to digital A lot happened in the history of projection during the s — like the arrival of those gigantic ships of projection that used cathode ray tube CRT to generate the image. Click thumbnail for larger text.

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Cite this article:. This page was last modified on 16 July , at Instead of rendering each individual frame of an image sequence in its entirety for a fraction of a second like a film system, mechanical television leveraged persistence of vision and the raster scan to record and display just a small portion of the image frame for an even smaller increment of time. The rapidly changing brightness, synchronized with the spiraling movement of the disc holes, caused the raster scan to appear as one continuous image — though in reality, it was recreating an image point by point , faster than the human eye could perceive.

The loud, cumbersome mechanical viewing device was quickly surpassed by a more elegant electronic solution, the Cathode-Ray Tube. Much like chemical film, the CRT was the result of centuries of research and advances in manufacturing capabilities.

In the late 19th century, vacuum tube manufacturing techniques were able to create an atmospheric pressure low enough for scientists to observe a new phenomenon. As more and more gas was pumped from the vacuum tube, the glow moved further and further away from the negatively charged cathode, and in a total vacuum, the tube itself began to glow at the positively-charged anode at the opposite end.

The observation of these cathode-rays was the genesis not just of electronic imaging, but a more concrete understanding of atomic physics.

For centuries, humans had experimented with electricity without fully comprehending the forces they were harnessing. By the mids, scientists were relatively confident that everything in the universe was made of miniscule molecules and even tinier atoms. In British Physicist J. Thompson successfully measured the mass of a cathode-ray inside a vacuum tube and found that it was times smaller than that of a hydrogen atom. This critical experiment gave us not only a deeper understanding of the building blocks of our universe but also television.

When electrons are shed from a negatively charged cathode and travel towards a positively charged anode in the vacuum of a cathode-ray tube, there are no gas atoms for them to crash into, so they travel in a straight unobstructed line known as an electron beam. By adding a phosphorescent material on the positively charged side of the vacuum tube and moderating the electrical voltage, researchers were able to accurately control the brightness of the point of light that occurred when the beam of electrons collided with the phosphor coating.

An electromagnet placed around the cathode could divert the electron beam to anywhere on the phosphor surface with an electrical signal. This small elementary particle is the force carrier not just for the light that comprises our visible world, but for the quantum mechanical function of the universe. By rapidly changing an electromagnetic field to direct a sub-atomic beam of electrons onto a reactive phosphor surface thousands of times a second to create photons that combine to form an image, Takayanagi achieved the first electronic illusion of persistent vision in 40 lines of point-by-point resolution.

Other systems debuted by Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin shortly afterward used electronic technology to capture a raster scan instead of a mechanical Nipkow Disc, but it would be decades before the CRT Television became commercially available in the s.

The concept of using a CRT as a display was also applied to optical projection. With the addition of a lens in front of a small bright CRT, the image could be thrown through space and displayed on any surface, instead of on just a small screen.

In fact, limitations in the size of phosphor screens in early CRT televisions meant that most early TV units were projection televisions , which used a lens to throw an enlarged CRT image onto a rear projection screen instead of viewing the phosphor of the CRT directly.

This style of projected television screen was a popular alternative through the end of the 20th century until its eventual replacement by LCD and DLP projectors. Color CRT projectors debuted in the s but were not commonly found for a few more decades. Using three CRTs together , each with their own lens, to project individual RGB channels simultaneously, they could accurately project accurate colors images without loud moving parts or film strips.

The introduction of commercial television inspired some filmmakers to experiment with new ways of projecting images without creating persistent vision. Stan Brakhage and others made films without a camera, by manipulating the film strip physically, whether by taping insects and flora to it, scratching off layers of emulsion, or painting it.

Their creations, when run through a film projector, did not show a sequence of images but rather thousands of subtly-related individual abstract frames.

CRT projectors were not bright enough to replace film projectors in most situations, but the situations and ways in which projectors were used continued to grow. Using 16mm footage of ghostly faces on a black mat background to selectively illuminate a physical counterpart in space, it created an ethereal illusion that had never been seen before.

Projection elements have been a part of amusement park rides ever since. IMAX projection, developed in the s, also immersed its audience by covering as large an area as possible with light. The IMAX format turned the image frame sideways and ran its 70mm film horizontally to maximize the picture. The gigantic projector emerged from the floor in the middle of a large dome, much like a planetarium, and an ultra-wide lens threw the image onto every part of the enormous curved surface.

The audience seated below saw an illuminated image that filled nearly their entire field of view , and the movement at the periphery of their vision made for one of the most thrilling projection experiences yet. A much less bulky projection system was also being used to create immersive experiences of an entirely different sort. The overhead projector developed by the US military in WWII used a mirror and condenser lens to project translucent images that are placed on top of a backlit Fresnel lens.

The Fresnel lens, invented by the French physicist of the same name, uses concentric rings to gather a light source into a concentrated beam. Since , the bulky glass versions have been used in lighthouses and high-powered searchlights. A smaller, thinner, rectangular version was developed as a screen for CRT projection televisions, and the same materials soon became a surface for live-projected content creation. Images and documents could be printed onto transparent plastic sheets, but they could also be written on directly.

This useful tool became common in schools and meeting rooms, but it also unlocked a new art form for people looking for a less structured experience. Liquid Light Shows were popular additions to Psychedelic Rock shows, as groups of artists began to project the interactions of oil, water, alcohol, and colored dyes onto a performance stage. These shows grew to use multiple overhead projectors, slide projectors, and film projectors, some with spinning color wheels placed in front of the beam.

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