Digital Goodness and Magic Light Boxes

After work I met up with Matt and we headed to the Boston Common to see Episode 2 in the Digital Theater… First things first… While I did notice the occasional aliasing (jaggies) on some text, that is about the only negative thing I have to say. The picture was so bright and the colors were so fantastic… I was astonished that I didn’t notice any compression artifacting….. Sorry this isn’t coherent, but if you are looking for an endorsement, you’ve got one as far as seeing this film digitally goes… I would like to see a few films that were shot on film on the DLP projector before giving an overall endorsement, but other than that….

Seeing the film again was nice, but about 4 minutes before the ending credits there was a fire alarm and the theater needed to be evacuated… I need to go back tomorrow for my refund, which blows… I guess I will go on my lunch break. The alarm came after all the action, but before the plot was fully tied up… I find it funny because when looking for the address of the theater this afternoon I came across this Citysearch page and one of the reviews at the bottom says “I have seen about 10-15 movies there since it opened and 3 of them have been interrupted by fire alarms.” Doesn’t sound like this theater has its shit together..

I also got my Afterburner kit for the GBA today, and I installed it after I got home. The installation took me about an hour, and I am going to need to get another antireflective film and re-do that part (a little bubble got trapped dead center, so I will need to reapply it). It is amazing how it accentuates dust on the screen, though… I don’t have any canned air here, but I do at work, so I can take care of that tomorrow…. In a stroke of genius I decided to use a Swiffer sheet to collect the dust off of the unit and when I did, it left a nasty translucent residue behind…. DO NOT DO THIS!!! It took about 20 minutes with a lens tissue and windex to get it back to normal.

BUT, now that it is all installed, I can also fully endorse this product… While it isn’t for the feint of heart (the installation gets your hands pretty “dirty”), the end result is worth it 100%. The screen clarity reminds me of the Atari Lynx and the Game Gear. The colors are a BIT washed out, but not as bad as many people have purported…. I think it looks beautiful…

Adam did his before me and gave me plenty of warnings; I doubt my install would have gone so smoothly without him to jump on the grenade for me… He completely screwed up the antireflective film and ended up skipping it in the end, and the colors without it are TERRIBLY washed out and there is horrible reflective banding… Apparently it is worth the effort… Some people who installed the AR film didn’t realize that BOTH sides of the AR film had protective coatings, so some complained that it made it look shitty… If these people applied it properly they wouldn’t complain…