Deepam’s upgrades digital system, to offer 3-D movies |10 November 2012

The cinema can now even cater for 3-D movies.
The La Salle D’Oeuvres cinema had closed for one month, and will re-open this weekend with a fully digital movie and sound system, and a 7.1 surround system, compared to the previous 5.1.

Deepam Cinema owner Subash Pillay told Seychelles Nation that the new system has a picture quality three times better than the previous one and a much higher sound quality.

And the fact that everything’s digital nowadays, they have the added bonus of being able to play 3-D movies.
Deepam Cinema opened on August 10, 1985 and started projecting films from 16mm reels for four years. After that it moved to 35mm, which had better picture quality.

In 2001, it had another major renovation installing air conditioning, better seats and Digital Theatre Sound (DTS) until recently.

Now, after the last renovation, Deepam is back and will now play movies from hard disks which play on a server. And the digital theatre system is said to be only four months old from the date is was first released on the market.

Mr Pillay said the new way Deepam Cinema gets movies is much easier compared to how it brought in the reels.

“When using reels, each reel was about 25kg each and very expensive in freight charges, but with the movies on a special hard disk, it is around only a third of the cost, and also has the extra feature of 3-D movies,” he said.

“With the 3-D movies, we are also providing active 3-D glasses, which are much better than passive 3-D glasses. The passive ones are use-once-and-then-discard, while the active ones are battery-operated, more costly and give a much more amazing movie-experience. And those we definitely are keeping after the movies!” he said.

There’s only a slight increase of R5 and R10 in the prices of tickets, and Mr Subash said the cinema will again undergo upgrading early next year, where new seats will be fitted in, for the further comfort of cinema-goers.

Deepam Cinema has received the help of Barclays with the project, which is said to have cost around R4.5 million.

I.H.