Laser Projectors and the Future of Digital Cinema

Mark Clowes is a strategic product manager for digital cinema projection systems at Sony Professional Solutions Europe. He began his career in Sony's broadcast division where he held a number of engineering roles. For several years he was a product marketing manager and successfully established new tape formats in the factual programming and news production communities. He later went on to head a team to launch high-definition production equipment into the U.K. film and television sectors. Following a period with BBC Technology, Clowes rejoined Sony in the newly-established digital cinema business where he has been at the forefront of introducing their 4K projection systems. He holds an honours degree in communication engineering and an MBA from Aston Business School. Sony has a long history in laser development. Beginning with laser diode manufacturing in 1986, they became a leading supplier to the compact disc, digital videodisc, Blu-ray, and games console markets. They began high power laser diode development in 2003. In 2005 they demonstrated a 60,000 lm laser projection exhibit at the Aichi Expo onto a 50 m wide screen, and in 2012, they showed the viability of high frame rate 3D projection with a laser light source using advanced de-speckling techniques for high-quality images on a silver screen. While they have not yet released a laser-illuminated projector for cinema onto the market they have been actively investigating all of the options for large-screen laser projection with particular emphasis on solving the conundrum of combining the benefits of laser-illuminated projection within the economic constraints of cinema exhibition.