We're developing a laser light engine for 35 mm and 70 mm film projection, and a new dual-gauge machine to put it in. No bulb to buy, ship, or change. It draws about 85% less power than the xenon chain it replaces, puts no infrared anywhere near the print, and holds the brightness you set for tens of thousands of hours.
You can't really order a new film projector. The last 70 mm line to exist survives as a 2023 call-for-interest rather than a catalog, so a venue that wants to run film goes shopping for seventy-year-old machines. Meanwhile the 70 mm runs sell out. Booths keeping film alive deserve equipment priced like equipment.
Run your booth's numbers Watch it run all six formats See the reel How the program worksFounding pilot venues shape the spec and get the first installs at cost. Write to [email protected]. Nothing here asks you for money or a signature.
Two reference configurations from our engineering model. A 9 m art house screen running 35 mm scope draws about 380 W at the wall, against roughly 2.3 kW for the xenon it replaces. A 12 m 70 mm house at 16 fL draws about 580 W, against 4.3 kW. These are concept-stage numbers. We'll publish the bench measurements that confirm or correct them.
Your existing 35 or 70 mm machine keeps its transport; the xenon lamphouse is replaced by a sealed laser module, new relay optics, and a control box with pulsed illumination and stall protection.
A new-build 35/70 projector: buy it for the weekly 35 mm calendar, add the 70 mm kit (sprocket, gate, lens) when the event bookings justify it.
Membership that coordinates archival loans and studio event prints across pilot venues, so the machine always has something worth booking.
Film is chemically silver. Halide in the emulsion, metallic silver in every black-and-white print ever struck. Colorado, where we're founded, was built by silver stamp mills: sheds full of machinery that ran precious material through, continuously. That's a projector's whole job too. It moves the material; it doesn't make it.
Above Silverton stands the best preserved of them, the Shenandoah-Dives Mill, a National Historic Landmark. The federal register entry calls it "intact and functional but inactive." Every projector we retrofit fits that description. We exist to delete the third word.
What exists today is the engineering: a parametric model covering optics, photometry, thermals and transport, a supply-chain plan, and a works-like design brief a machine shop could quote from.
What's happening now is conversation. We're working through thirty venues, archives and projectionists, which is what this page is for. Founding pilots shape the spec and get the first installs at cost.
After that comes the illumination bench: measured lumens, uniformity, speckle contrast, gate temperature, all of it published whether or not it flatters us. Then a donor-machine retrofit. Then one lighthouse installation with real before-and-after numbers from a real booth.
Cinemeccanica deserves a mention here, having kept film projection alive longer than anyone. Their laser kits serve digital machines and the Victoria 8 restart is still a call-for-interest, but if they ship a new 70 mm machine before we do, the audience wins either way.
We won't take deposits before a public working demonstration. Letters of intent are non-binding.
Talk to usSilvermill is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by any projector manufacturer, studio, or exhibitor. Todd-AO, Ultra Panavision, IMAX, Barco and other marks referenced in our technical materials belong to their owners and are used descriptively only.
Engineering figures are first-order design targets from our parametric model, stated with assumptions in our published design brief; bench measurements will replace them. Class-4 laser development conducted under IEC 60825 discipline; product path per IEC 62471-5.
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