There is not so much information available about professional cinema projectors. One of the reasons is that the general public goes to a cinema and doesn’t often see these projectors, as opposed to the projectors for home use. Another reason is that professional movies were aggressively copy-protected by the movie industry, so only a selected few were capable of showing cinema movies.

The book “Deutsche Laufbildprojektoren” gives information which is hard to find elsewhere. I remember trying to get a copy of the original book and having to search for over a year to get hold of it (and paying a stiff price too). The veteran collectors who have it won’t part from it easily.

The technology of these projectors is advanced and rugged. The German Ernemann Imperator projector for example conquered the market early. In 1913,  22 out of 28 cinemas in Paris had these projectors. As recent as 1979 some of these projectors were still in operation.

This kind of information and much more needs to be kept accessible as a document of history. Normally it could be made public only 70 years after death of the last author. Therefor the copyright-holders agreeing to it’s re-publication in electronic form August 14 is something many appreciate.

The ebook “Deutsche Laufbildprojektoren” (”German movie projectors”) has a lot of images. To be able to maintain high image quality, the files would become too large to send over the internet. Therefor in january 2005 imaging expert David Lerner was consulted to find the optimum balance between filesize and quality.

For the result have a look at the sneak preview, where parts of the “Deutsche Laufbildprojektoren” ebook have been enabled. In particular the section about Messter projektors.

We’re still on schedule for the launch of the ebook August 14, 2006. Again services of the German based Share-It! will be used as a reliable partner for online distribution, we’re now in the process of testing the procedures. As experienced with the launch of my previous ebook, absolutley nothing went wrong, I’m still amazed with the spot-on efficiency these people have.

“Deutsche Laufbildprojektoren” is an authoritative book about antique German theatre projectors. It was published in 1986 by the “Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek” and the 3000 copies of the first print are sold out a long time ago.

The book was made in a joint effort by Herbert Tümmel (now deceased) and Jochen Hergersberg.

Fortunately, Mr. Hergersberg and the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek have agreed to republish the book. To reduce the high production costs involved, it has been decided to use modern technology: it will be published in electronic form as an eBook which can be downloaded, viewed on a computer and printed out.

And so the “Deutsche Laubildprojektoren” project was born. In the next blogs I’ll be giving more background information. In the meantime have a look at the review.