Our team in Plano, Texas for this weekend's huge Episode I convention just got to see Texas Instruments' first unveiling of their new digital projection system for theatres.

The system was demonstrated on a 24' by 12' screen with full THX/Dolby Surround-EX sound. The audience was shown clips from The Jackal and the THX Wow presentation, which includes clips from the Star Wars trilogy, Willow, and the Indiana Jones trilogy.

The picture is absolutely fantastic! Regardless of how close to the screen you are, the picture stays clean and crisp, a huge improvement over current film projectors. Amazingly enough, the resolution of the digital projector showcased was only 1280 x 1024 pixels--apparently, a larger resolution does not make any noticeable difference in quality. The picture is digitally compressed with the motion-JPEG format, which was found to be higher in quality than MPEG.

As previously announced, two theaters (which have not been announced yet) will be showing The Phantom Menace with the new technology--one on the East Coast, one on the West. When theatres are announced, the showings will be available to all members of the public.

Incidentally, the digital projection system could also be hitting the home market as early as 2000.