The Aussiemorphic Lens MK3 - Anamorphic Lens for Home Cinema - For True Cinemascope Images - Made in Australia by CAVX and Oz Theatre Screens

Phone (07) 3804 6869 | Email sales@anamorphiclens.com.au | Dealer inquiries welcome

NEWS May 16th 2009: The MK3 is now available in a custom white finish. For those of you with white ceilings and or white projectors, the MK3 in white is a nice match!

NEWS May 5th 2009: See what others are saying! Folks around Australia and the World have been recieving their MK3 lenses. Check out the AVS Forum in the USA for the MK3 thread and also DTV Forum for a couple of current threads.

NEWS April 15th 2009: Finally, the MK3 is now shipping. This week around 30 of the 50 MK3 lenses will be shipping throughout the world.

Dealer inquiries are welcome. At this stage we have dealers in NZ, Mexico, USA, Canada, Cayman Islands, and many in Australia. A dealer page will be started soon.

The lens itself is purely hybrid by nature, featuring a piano black acrylic cradle and case with black velour lining the inside. The total product will ship under 5KG and comes with a free heavy duty slide (not in picture)

The black case is our standard finish.

NEWS Nov 28th 2008: CA corrected sample prisms finally arrived and blew us away! At the bottom of this page are some screen shots taken today. We are now working within a 6-8 week time frame for this lens to be ready for the retail market. We appreciate your patience, this has taken longer than expected but the end result is looking stunning!

NEWS Oct 15th 2008: Something new and exciting is coming! We have been working with CAVX on the development of the new CA corrected Aussiemorphic MK3 Lens!

What's great about this new lens is it will now rival lenses costing upwards of $4,000 but for much much less. The suggested RRP for this high end prism lens will be $1,999. Rather impressive when you consider what is in the market at present.

The Aussiemorphic MK3 lens is a cost effective Anamorphic Lens for use in Home Cinema applications. The Aussiemorphic Lens is a wholly Australian Made 2 prism 4 element horizontal expansion lens, and when used in conjunction with a projector or scaler that can do the required vertical stretch, the result is true cinemascope with no grey bars top or bottom, just like the Movies. The lens uses BBAR (Broadband Anti Reflective Coated) low dispersion achromatic glass prisms. In other words folks, this is not a 'trophy lens', this is the real deal!

Designed and manufactured by CAVX and Oz Theatre Screens, for use with our legendary Majestic Scope Screens, the Aussiemorphic Lens is the best value for money CA corrected Anamorphic Lens on the market. You no longer need a six figure income to enjoy Cinemascope movies in your own home - The Way The Director Intended!

The Aussiemorphic Lens can be purchased online at our store www.projectorscreens.com.au and we ship Worldwide. Dealer and distributor inquiries are also welcome.

See below to better understand our lens and cinemascope and learn why you need one and why you'll want one!

We start here with a Cinemascope projection screen that has a ratio of 2.37:1 (21.33 X 9). All cinemascope movies will have grey bars at the top and bottom which make up a total of 25% of the image height. These grey bars are not black as digital projectors cannot project black, only shades of grey (which vary according to the projector being used). Looks rather ordinary don't you think?

There are only 810 viewable lines of resolution for a 1080P Projector and only 540 viewable lines for a 720P Projector.

We then use a projector or an external scaler that can perform the electronic vertical stretch. This stretches the image vertically and utilises the active pixels that are wasted in the grey bars which increasing your on screen light output by 33% instantly. The problem here is everyone will look tall and skinny. (In this particular shot it's the trees that look out of shape)

We are now using the entire 1,080 lines of vertical resolution for a 1080P Projector and the entire 720 lines for a 720P Projector.

The 3rd step is to use an Anamorphic Lens. The Aussiemorphic Lens is a horizontal expansion lens that optically restores the geometry of the vertically stretch image.

The result is deluxe cinemascope widescreen with no annoying grey bars top or bottom ever again.

Take a look at the top shot (the letterboxed image) and compare it to the image on the left. When you measure the image sizes. What you have is 1.78 X 1 - less 25% for the black bars - so we end up with 1.78 X .75 = 1.335 squares.

But for cinemascope we have 2.37 X 1 = 2.37 squares.

2.37 divided by 1.335 = 1.77. Which means your cinemascope movies, combined with a lens are now 1.77 times larger image than the original letterboxed viewable image. 77% larger.

Not only do you end up with optimal 16:9 image size but you now have a very immersive cinemascope image with more resolution, more detail and higher brightness. This is how they do it at the movies. The ads finish, a lens slides into place and the curtains open up to the walls. Cinemascope is meant to be larger than HDTV, not small than the 6 o'clock news!

When we utilise the pixels from the grey bars we increase the overall vertical pixel count. On a 1080P projector there are only 810 viewable lines of resolution when watching a cinemascope movie without a lens. When we vertically stretch an image we end up utilising the full 1,080 lines of resolution. (the way we were meant to view the movie) This results in a 25% increase in active pixels, in other words a 25% increase in brightness. (imagine the above images being a white field to understand better)

'Zooming', often called 'the poor mans lens' increases the size of the pixels by 33%, because 33% is the amount of zooming that's required to move the grey bars out off the screen. If you zoom, (which is entirely up to you), you will only ever have 810 lines of vertical resolution no matter how you look at it.

The major downside of zooming (besides the 33% loss in resolution and image detail) is you will be required, every single time, to manually adjust the projectors zoom, and if it's ceiling mounted it can make changing back and forth difficult and annoying at best. The other downside is the wall where the screen sits need to be painted a dark colour to absorb the light from the grey bars.

In other words, when you compare an Anamorphic Lens to zooming, a lens will yield (in theory) a 33% brighter image. However, 30-32% brighter is a more reasonable figure as no lens on the market is 100% efficient.

The other point is image detail. Zooming will yield 33% less resolution and detail over using a lens.

Why coat lenses? Broadband Optical Coating reduces stray light bouncing off the prisms both in between the prisms and on the outside. BBAR makes the glass nearly 100% transmissive, which means they become fully effective in their role in projection. Without coating you will see a secondary image to the left of the screen and a third image on the right side of your wall where the stray light leaks out from behind the lens. You can often have a 4th image on your ceiling!

Glass is typically 92% transmissive, which means an 8% loss of light per prism. This is doubled because anamorphic lenses comprise of 2 (or more) glass elements. The result is 16% stray light. In fact it will be slightly higher, around 20% since wedge prisms are not flat like window glass. The MK3 glass elements are fully optically coated making them more transmissive than standard glass.

It really is simple mathematics. 1,080 lines will show more detail over 810 lines (used with the zoom method). The result is an image utilising the full pixel count which will yield a more detailed image. (The above shot is a simulated image)

What does CA do to an image? Chromatic Abberations are caused by the inability of the glass to focus the projectors red, blue and green light at one focal point. The three light wavelengths are displaced, sometimes up to 15 to 30 pixels in width. This causes both colour fringing which is CA. It also causes a major softening of the image.

With a proper CA corrected lens, these optical problems are eliminated. Colour fringing and focus issues are now removed entirely, leaving you with an image that out performs your local cinema!

What does CA look like? In the next week we plan to photograph and document what CA looks like on a test grid.

Imagine being at the Cinema, knowing what you went to see was a Cinemascope Movie, the ads and previews come on and run their course, you're waiting for the lens to slide across and the curtains to open right out the walls, but something else happens. The curtains don't open up to the walls, instead, they present the Cinemascope movie as a letterboxed 16:9 film with grey bars top and bottom. Oh the shock, the image is the same width as the boring ads but is 33% shorter. The ads were bigger! Doesn't quite sound right does it? The ads were bigger than the actual movie.

Well, sadly this is what we've been settling for in Home Cinema. If you use a 16:9 screen, all your Cinemascope movies will be smaller than the local news! If you do the maths, a letterboxed 16:9 image is 1.78 X .75 = 1.33 - This means letterboxed scope films have an image area the same as a 4:3 film, or 33% smaller than the news and 77% smaller than Cinemascope with a lens in place.

How do you create that immersion factor you get at the Cinema in your own home? You do what the pros do, use an Anamorphic Lens and a Cinemascope Screen. (Cinema screens are in cinemascope format, not 16:9, they just use curtains to mask the width when required)

The good news is now it is affordable. At long last, a high quality CA corrected anamoprhic lens at an unheard of price. This Aussiemorphic MK3 lens will bring true Cinemascope into the home of the 'ordinary man' - that's most of us! Lenses will always be an essential part of home cinema for those wanting an immersive movie experience. We see the lens as a normal piece of home theatre equipment just like the projector and screen. Afterall, the advantages of a lens and scope screen are unrivalled.

This is Cinemascope on a 16:9 or HDTV screen

This is Cinemascope

- Smaller than the evening news! -

This is Extroadinary