Italy's HD home-theater projector maker SIM2 is partnering with US firm Entertainment Experience to create a "better than Blu" solution for high-end home entertainment installations. They announce that they will begin offering a hardware-software content solution including pre-loaded, fully licensed motion picture content that delivers better-than-HD digital video performance.

SIM2 and its partner demonstrated their new Digital Entertainment Solution at the 2008 CEDIA Show in Denver. "The time has come for top-tier home theater content to move beyond HDTV standards, to a format that can truly equal archival-quality film for visual content," says SIM2's VP of Marketing and Sales, Charlie Boornazian, "SIM2 already has the display technologies well in hand to allow us to begin migrating these technologies from the commercial digital-cinema world, while Entertainment Experience has the know-how and access to help make this a practical reality."

The Digital Entertainment Solution incorporates SIM2's C3X 1080 Full HD Home Theatre Projector, the world's smallest three-chip DLP projector. Capable of reference-grade home-theater imaging at up to 1920x1080p. The center incorporates advanced video processing calibrated to the DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative) color standards recently adopted by most Hollywood studios and distributors, as well as removeable-hard-disk data storage to accommodate multiple DCI-standard motion picture titles ready for immediate playback.

Digital Entertainment predicts that the solution's movie content ultimately will encompass more than 4000 major titles from multiple studio and distribution partners, which will be delivered direct to consumers via hard drives that may be swapped into the Center's drive-bays. Each movie occupies approximately 40-50GB of storage space, due to data rates up to 3x that of conventional HD of the future-proof DCI Color format defined by Hollywood for professional cinemas.

It is unclear whether Hollywood studios are warming up to the new system, having finally settled on Blu-ray. SIM2 and Entertainment Experience expect content to be "available soon."

Story filed 15.09.08