Appreciating Dolby Cinema
Earlier today, we had breakfast and then went to see an opening weekend showing of the “Fantastic Four: First Steps” movie by Marvel Studios. The tickets I booked for this opening weekend were in a local AMC Dolby Cinema movie theater [1]. Actually taking the time to go see a movie in a theater for me generally means picking a truly immersive experience. I like the IMAX, Dolby Cinema, or sometimes the ScreenX format. I’ll admit that the only ScreenX 270-degree panoramic view movie I have ever seen was the second Top Gun movie called, "Top Gun: Maverick.” It was a pretty awesome movie-going experience. Most of the time during the opening weekend, we look at the time and pick between the IMAX and the Colby Cinema option. Both of those screen formats are truly immersive and provide a high-quality movie-going experience. My preferred format at the moment happens to be the Dolby Cinema environment. The seats are better, and they are generally newer than the IMAX theaters.
Don’t worry, this post does not have any spoilers from the new Fantastic Four movie. It was a decent movie. I would not recommend against watching it. The Rotten Tomatoes score is pretty good, and overall, it was a decent movie. Generally speaking, it was a fun movie to get to watch on the big screen. A lot of the scenes took advantage of the whole screen. Some movies like the Dune franchise are just so much better on a big screen. I don’t think watching the Fantastic Four movie later on a smaller screen would take anything away from it. The Dune movies were just epic on a larger format screen, and I think that is the same way I felt about the Lord of the Rings trilogy. While I love rewatching the movies at home, that initial screening at the theater was just an amazing experience. 4K Blu-ray technology at home is just not the same as a truly immersive movie-going experience. Sometimes it’s just fun to be able to go to the movies.
I do still have in my possession several hundred Blu-ray discs and a standalone Sony player. Some of those are HD, and a few of them are 4K quality. I certainly can tell the difference between standard definition and HD, but anything more than that is sometimes more difficult to discern. It’s possible my 4K television is just not good enough and needs to be upgraded at some point. However, to be fair, the journey into 8K televisions just never really landed. Generally available technology just sort of plateaued at 4K with a mix of streaming quality, over-the-air broadcasts, and deployed physical televisions.
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