Madagascar: digital cinema's animal tales

We've been enjoying our NEC HT510 projector, so it's been a while since Crave experienced that authentic cinema atmosphere. Lucikly, Dolby wanted to show us how it plans to tranform our local fleapits with its new Dolby Digital Cinema technology.

Inviting us to a presentation of Madagascar captured directly from the digital source, we headed off to the Empire Leicester Square to see what all cinema will look like in ten years' time. So excited that we could barely hold on to our popcorn, we sat down in reclining chairs, eager to see how digital could possibly compare to film -- a medium with a 100-year history.

Disappointment set in as the trailers displayed all the scratches and sound drops we've got used to from film. However, it was the perfect way to judge the upgrade to digital -- as the main feature started and the projector brought up the Dolby Digital Cinema logo, we could barely stop punching the air in glee.

The film is literally flawless, and that's saying something, given the screen's one and a half times as tall as a double-decker bus. And the sound -- oh, the sound. It's like audio nectar. Many people have told Crave they've stopped going to the cinema and just wait for the DVD. We'd make an effort to see even Sandra Bullock's latest if it was being shown in digital.

Of course, there's one small problem -- Hollywood is adopting digital filmmaking very slowly. There have been big-name exceptions like Sin City and Star Wars Episode III, so we just have to hope it becomes the norm over time.

In the meantime, is there any way to recreate this experience in your own home? Well, you'll need to wait for high definition movies before you could possibly match the quality of Dolby Digital Cinema. Most importantly, you'd need a 3-chip DLP projector that could service HD DVD or Blu-ray with the kind of silky smooth images we go weak at the knees for. And the average price for one of these babies? Try £25,000 for Sim2's HT500 E-LINK. Needless to say, we're already bothering Sim2 with a barrage of phone calls to try it out for ourselves.

Madagascar is showing digitally at the Empire Leicester Square and the new Odeon cinema in Bath. Dolby has promised more films will follow soon. -GC

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