Digital Cinema: Ireland's movie theaters to convert within a year?

The current issue of Wired Magazine includes a feature I wrote about digital cinema -- interviewees include d-cinema evangelist and Landmark Theatres owner Mark Cuban; filmmaker James Cameron; and hardware makers including Texas Instruments and Sony. It's not online yet, but I'll be posting related news clips here on Boing Boing, and will blog the Wired piece as soon as it's up.

Today: news of a planned digital cinema network throughout the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with the ambitious goal of converting all of the country's movie theaters to digital format within about a year.

"The digital projection offers picture-perfect quality and significant cost savings," says Moira Horgan, the head of marketing for the Irish Film Board. "The boxes are being inserted as we speak."

Avica Technology is bringing the digital presentation systems to 515 screens throughout Ireland to run alongside traditional 35mm film projectors, says Kevin Cummins, spokesman for Avica Europe, the European arm of the Santa Monica, California, digital cinema technology and services company.

"Digital can reduce the cost of distribution, eliminating the need for costly reels of film that need to be printed, delivered, collected once the cinema is done showing the movie, and then destroyed," Cummins says. "From the (average viewer's) point of view, digital provides picture-perfect quality. The movies just look a lot better, from the first showing through to a thousand showings."

Link to Ireland Putting Digital Films in Every Cinema (PC World). (Thanks, Chris Anderson!)