A chance observation by 2ch has led to the surprising discovery that some Japanese movie theatres are actually playing their films from PS3s.

The tale begins with a 2ch denizen’s visit to a Sendai cinema, where the audience’s viewing of Kara no Kyoukai was rudely interrupted by the appearance of an onscreen warning to recharge their controller.

Opinion was quickly split as to whether this was a fine advertisement of the PS3’s capabilities or a rather miserly move on the part of the cinema.

Soon the news spread through 2ch-watching blogs and was picked up by a site which apparently managed to confirm by way of Aniplex that the showing was indeed using a PS3, though not using Blu-ray as some had thought.

It transpires that full HD at 1920×1080 was being stored on the PS3 HDD, with the quality apparently indistinguishable from more typical projector-source hardware.

A number of cinemas are apparently using this method, though it might be hoped they are rather more careful about keeping their controllers charged…

http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2009/09/09/ps3-powers-cinemas/

lolz about the controller recharge warning, but otherwise very cool.

Well they obviously werent using the Blu-ray remote like they should be

That's why "it only does everything so believe.

meh, they are cheeping out rather than using real film and projector which is superior.

well...it's an interesting/cool idea

Every movie theater these days uses hard drives.

But movies theaters run at a higher resolution then 1080P.  I would probably be kind of angry if I went to a movie theater and they were projecting TV resolutions on a big screen.

Fixed. 

The amount of people capable of making that distinction are probably fewer than you'd expect.

I would agree, but this starts to become a discussion about how large the screen is and how far back you are sitting.  I know too many people that can't tell the difference between 480P and 720P, so it wouldn't suprise me to have someone not see low picture quality at a movie theater.  Although I would expect some people to be able to see issues when you are displaying roughly 1/6th the amount of pixels in a modern digital theater (this may not be noticeable if your using a small screen).