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MillimeterSign of the Times
Apr 9, 2009 12:00 PM, By D.W. Leitner
A look at the Canon Realis WUX10, Canon EOS 5D Mark II, and other signposts on the road to low-cost innovation.
This frame was taken with a Canon
TS-E45mm f/2.8 tilt-shift lens on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. The left background is out-of-focus while the right, where the lady in blue is standing, remains sharp.
All photos by D.W. Leitner and Mark Forman
I recently had a production meeting with a young cameraman who owns a Sony PMW-EX3. In the course of getting to know one other, he asked me what it was like to shoot film, which he said he’d very much like to do one day. I’ve shot so much film I almost have yellow blood, which is what they used to say about lifetime Kodak employees in Rochester, N.Y.
I commented that from a logistics point of view, shooting 16mm was like shooting with tape cassettes that lasted 10 minutes. He looked at me and, with slight embarrassment, said, “I’ve never shot tape either.”
There’s a first time for everything.
Call them the Red generation. Or generation P2. They’re talented young DPs and camera owner/ operators born into a time of hastening transformation, in which old methods are yielding to new ones at a pace almost no one can keep up with. In a time of file-based acquisition, the 1980s term “videographer” sounds as quaint as “magic lanternist.”
Another sign of the times: During TV coverage of President Obama’s recent address to Congress and the nation, as press and video camerapeople hurriedly scrummed down the aisle in advance of congressional pooh-bahs, I noticed a female journalist holding out a still camera as she walked, intently eyeing the rear of the camera. You guessed it: She was recording moving images.
So when Canon offered its new Realis WUX10 projector for review, I seized an opportunity to survey a handful of the developments that are unfolding across our fast-changing landscape, which I’ll detail below.
The WUX10 is a briefcase-sized wonder: 3200 lumens from something that weighs 10.8lbs., same as an early laptop computer. (I still recall lumbering Eidophors the size of refrigerators. Look it up on Wikipedia.) The WUX10 is the world’s first WUXGA (1920x1200) liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) projector.
While 3200 lumens can’t illuminate anything boasting stadium seating, it’s not chump change either. Today’s high-end 1080p (native 1920x1080) home-theater projectors, LCoS or DLP, typically put out 700 lumens to 900 lumens and weigh about 25lbs. The few 1080p projectors—mostly single-chip DLP—that come even close to 10lbs. often rely on an additional outboard processor.
So what’s the catch?
It’s the WUX10’s notably weak contrast ratio of 1000:1—that’s Canon’s own spec—which is evocative of early LCD projectors with milky blacks. Even home-theater projectors these days start at 2000:1 or 3000:1 and often claim 5000:1 or more. How can this be?
Perhaps it’s my wabi-sabi sense of beauty in imperfection (a Japanese aesthetic), but I find the Realis WUX10—and what it portends—no less intriguing because of this very inadequacy. Or is it?
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.