Mike Perkins was 11 years old when he first saw Star Wars in a theatre. That screening, he told the University of Waterloo, is where his ambition to make the "impossible possible" began.In 2011, Dolby gave the engineering team at Christie in Kitchener, Ontario, a request of just that kind.
Dolby's high-end monitors could already show high dynamic range, with deep shadows and bright highlights in the same frame. But it wanted a projector that could do the same on a cinema screen.
"A typical cinema projector has a contrast ratio of 2,000:1, and we were developing one that needed to exceed 1,000,000:1, an improvement of 500 times," said Perkins, Christie's principal product developer.
Christie's own account of the next four years fits in a sentence.
What "started out as an impossible task moved to a series of less impossible tasks, then to a noisy, 600-pound prototype," the company wrote in a profile of the project, and finally to a finished system that screened Tomorrowland in 2015.
That system, the Christie E3LH Dolby Vision Cinema Projection System, earned Perkins and three collaborators, Gerwin Damberg, Trevor Davies, and Martin J. Richards, a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2024.
The problem it solved is one every projection designer meets sooner or later, in a cinema, a planetarium, or a blended multi-projector array. In each setting, this is where a projector cannot fully get rid of the light it doesn't want. Turning the light source up does not fix that. The Kitchener team's answer was to change the architecture, and Christie has since taken that level of contrast into pro AV.
The light that won't leave
A DLP projector forms its image on a digital micromirror device, a chip of tiny tilting mirrors. Each mirror either sends its pixel's light toward the lens or flicks it away. Some of the discarded light scatters back into the picture anyway, and that stray light sets the darkest level the screen can show.
"The contrast ratio exists because there's a limit to how much light we can 'throw' away," Perkins said.
Cinema standards are built around that limit. The SMPTE reference projector calls for a nominal sequential contrast of 2,000:1, with a minimum of 1,200:1 for cinemas, and a reference white of 48 nits, about 14 foot-lamberts, according to Cinepedia.
Simply increasing the light output does not solve the contrast problem. With the same optical design, a brighter source can raise both the highlights and the residual light in areas meant to be black, leaving the contrast ratio largely unchanged.To reach Dolby's range, the projector had to discard much more of its light, and do it more cleanly.
"This was innovative because, at the time, no one would have dreamed about throwing away that much light," said Darren Hoffman, Christie's senior program manager on the project.
Multiply, don't add
The principle behind the fix came from Vancouver. Around 2000, University of British Columbia physicist Lorne Whitehead needed a way to show how glare would look inside daylit building designs, and no display of the time had the range.
His solution, he recalled in a 2021 interview, was to shine a computer projector through a large lens system onto the back of an LCD screen. Each device managed about 256:1. Stacked, their ranges multiplied, for a predicted 65,536:1. The machine was 200cm deep.
Whitehead and his student Helge Seetzen then learned, during a visit by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory researcher Greg Ward, that the rear image could be slightly blurry without the eye noticing. That made a thin version practical, with an LED array behind an LCD. The pair spun the work out as BrightSide Technologies, which Dolby acquired in 2007. Damberg moved from Germany about two decades ago to join a UBC-based startup, the North Shore News reported, and has been "hooked on the cinema and broadcast space" since.
The cinema version needed the same multiplication inside a projector. So Perkins' team began designing in 2012 and, for a while, the problem stumped them. The breakthrough came on the road.
"I had a lightbulb moment while driving, and I just knew the path we should take," Perkins said. The idea was a first imaging stage feeding a second, which he described as "building a projector inside a projector."
The Academy's citation for the award describes the result as "a novel dual modulation technique that employs cascaded DLP chips along with an improved laser optical path."
One set of chips decides roughly where the light goes. A second set forms the final image. Where the frame is black, both stages block the light, so the leakage from the first is cut again by the second. In Christie's telling, the breakthrough was synchronizing two light engines inside one projector.
"The optical path design of the projection system was completely new," said Edwin He, a senior product developer on the team.
Timing helped. The system runs on red, green, and blue lasers, and Christie was already working on RGB pure laser illumination.
"It was just becoming a mature technology that we were able to leverage," Perkins said.
The engineering wasn't confined to Ontario. Perkins also worked with Brass Roots Technologies, an optics and electronics design firm in Allen, Texas, that Christie acquired in 2022.
From prototype to 300 screens
Dolby and Christie went public in December 2014. The Dolby Vision system would use two custom 4K laser projection heads with Christie's 6P modular laser light sources, and the JT cinema in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, would be among the first to install one, according to the joint announcement.
Christie promised up to 31 foot-lamberts for 2D Dolby Vision content, more than twice the standard reference, and 14 in 3D.
"Cinema projection does not get any better than this," said Don Shaw, then Christie's senior director of product management.
The difference is easiest to see where nothing is meant to be on screen. Christie says the E3LH shows black "without residual light," in place of the dark grey of standard digital projection. Even Hoffman needed convincing.
"When I heard the idea the first time, I thought, 'OK, why is that so exciting?'" he said, “[But] it really makes a gigantic difference to have the deepest blacks onscreen."
Filmmakers noticed.
"Directors were amazed at the number of little details they could see in their movies that they had forgotten about capturing," Perkins said.
By the time of the award, the system was installed across more than 300 commercial and non-commercial screens in more than 15 countries, and 3D colour correction and review rooms.
The Academy honoured three laser projectors that year. Alongside the E3LH, the list of honorees included the IMAX Prismless Laser Projector and the Barco RGB Laser Projector. The E3LH was the one cited for dual modulation and high dynamic range theatrical presentation. It was Christie's third Academy Award. The first two, in 1983 and 1998, were for film-transport machinery.
Where the idea went next
The performance didn't stay in cinemas. In 2019, Christie launched Christie Eclipse, an RGB pure laser projector for planetariums, giant screens, and themed attractions, rated at up to 20,000,000:1 contrast and from 2,000 to 30,000 lumens. Waterloo describes Eclipse as the E3LH's "high-end home theatre sister projector."
For integrators, the pitch was a familiar headache removed.
"With true HDR, 'video blacks' are a thing of the past," said Larry Paul, Christie's executive director of technology and custom solutions, at the launch.
Christie says the deeper blacks eliminate the need for optical masking and black-level compensation in multi-projector arrays. But image alignment, warping and edge blending are still required where projected images overlap.
Black-level blending is the step that lifts the black across a blended array to hide its brighter overlap zones. The third generation, Eclipse G3, arrived in August 2025 with six DLP chips, 30,000 ANSI lumens, and coverage of about 98% of Rec. 2020.
The cinema line has also slimmed down. In March 2025, Christie and Dolby announced a next-generation Dolby Vision laser projection system with a lighter, smaller chassis, more than twice the brightness of typical cinema presentations, and contrast "well exceeding a million-to-one." It can run as a single projector on screens up to 58 feet wide, Variety reported, with larger screens using two. At CinemaCon that spring, AMC and Dolby announced 40 more Dolby Cinema auditoriums in the US by the end of 2027.
Perkins' next target is the price.
"I want to find ways to get the costs down and take this level of performance to the mainstream," he said.
Nobody wants to hear about it
The award ceremony was held at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. "Everybody was dressed up, red carpet and everything," Damberg said. But for Perkins, the recognition from the Academy's panel of experts mattered most.
"To earn their respect is humbling," he said.
Back at the movies with his family, Damberg has learned to keep the engineering to himself.
"It really kills the atmosphere talking about contrast, brightness, colour gamut," he told the North Shore News. "Nobody wants to hear about that."
That is the measure of the work. The audience is not supposed to notice the projector at all. Perkins was 11 when a film in a theatre made him want to make the impossible possible. In a Dolby Cinema auditorium today, a kid that age watching a starfield sees the space between the stars as black, without the grey glow, and has no reason to think about why.