LaborBerlin: State-of-the-Art 16mm Projector
14 comments
·June 21, 2025moonshinefe
Thanks for sharing. I was a projectionist at a local theater in my 20s, and I have very fond memories of working with the older machines. There was something so satisfying working them on Summer nights in the booth alone.
The move to digital projectors everywhere was very shortly after I left.
Always cool to see people help keep the medium alive.
PaulHoule
Circa 1990 I was on the movie committee of the student council at my undergrad school and had the job of periodically checking out a 16mm projector from the library and lugging it across campus to the student union building where we'd show a movie every Friday. I remember showing Rebel Without a Cause. We had a video projector in the same room though and had found it was cheaper to get a license to show VHS tapes which was a lot easier on the projectionist although it was much worse quality.
sho_hn
Super awesome project. As an embedded engineer who grew up in the arthouse/program cinemas of Berlin, I wish I had heard about this two years ago. Would have loved to help out.
M4rkJW
Neat stuff! I have a ton of 8mm and some 16mm film to archive, perhaps this is a good first step towards an open-source film scanner.
Animats
8mm film scanners are so common they're available at Walmart. There are lots of DIY film scanners described on Youtube. They don't have to run fast and they don't need a pull-down mechanism, so they're simple devices.
yapyap
Question: the blogpost mentions archivists needing 16mm projectors. Now I assume they would use these projectors to archive 16mm film but how / why?
Why not scan film in instead of.. projecting it on a wall and filming that to archive?
At least thats what I’m extracting from the blog with my fair but limited knowledge, if someone could enlighten me it’d be greatly appreciated!
gwbas1c
> Why not scan film in instead of.. projecting it on a wall and filming that to archive?
It's a different experience: When viewing film, the picture flickers and shakes. Film grain is substantially different than pixels.
As much as I enjoy modern digital formats, it's important to appreciate the goal of preserving viewing film.
sublinear
If it's to be archived it's going to end up encoded as pixels.
I think the question was more about the capture of fine detail. A scanner will digitize much more image detail than any capture of the projector output.
sublinear
I don't know much either, and this is all way before my time, but I'm going to guess that getting sound off the film (if it has it) has got to be one of the reasons.
The other being that just operating a suitable projector as intended is the simplest and most accurate way compared to finding or writing software to handle scans. I'd think they'd want to do both.
sandworm101
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the_third_wave
One thing seems odd: it takes an 800W LED to double the light output of a 250W halogen bulb. Normally LED is far more efficient than halogen so I wonder why the opposite is true for this project.
Animats
The LED lamp system they built looks like it was designed by an overclocker.
sandworm101
An 800w LED is not as perfect a point source. They are loosing lots of light that isn't focusable. See how in the comparison picture that there is insane light bleed out the side from the LED projector. The older projector benefits from a hundred years of optimization of how to focus a lightbulb into an image. The LED rig is starting from scratch with a source that isn't meant for focus onto an image.
Curious: Why do they need to support all those different frame rates?