AMC Lincoln Square 13
1998 Broadway,
New York,
NY
10023
1998 Broadway,
New York,
NY
10023
78 people
favorited this theater
Showing 826 - 850 of 1,707 comments
It’s a shame they’re allowing this to continue – I had spoke to the CQO about an issue at their “new” “downgraded” IMAX at Palisades Center where a light above the screen washed out any dark scenes. The rest of this complex is terrible – the last two 2D films I had seen here had the Real D polarizing filters on and the only presentation that was quite good was Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk in 3D because Sony made special accommodations. They should have made special accommodations to present the film in a better theatre…..
alpinedownhiller – about seeing my own reflection in the lens, let me explain. I’ve sat dead center in my visits to the location, in rows F and G. When I sit there, with the 3D glasses on as the movie is playing, I can see the reflection of my own eyeballs in the glasses – I see everything that’s on the screen and the 3D effect, but the reflection of my eyeball is clearly visible on the lens. When I spoke with the IMAX CQO about this, he said that other people had reported the same thing. It may not affect everyone, and some people may be more sensitive to it than others, but it’s definitely a problem that’s been reported and acknowledged. The lens coating is a highly reflective surface, and instead of just filtering the correct “eye view” for each eye, they also reflect whatever other light is around.
Besides the blue lights on the floor, I don’t know if anyone has noticed, they also left a row of the ceiling lights on after the movie started(Not sure if they are lights or holes). They are straightly above the EXIT signs near the two entrances. You could see them when you look up or look at the walls above the EXIT signs, especially during the dark scenes
Or avoid movies with names like “LEGO BATMAN MOVIE IN IMAX 3D” altogether until they really care who they alienate forever.
I wsih to hell Reading had not watched everyone exiting like hawks and I had been able to pocket a couple pairs of the working type 1 glasses. Could clean them up nicely and not have to worry about the typical dirty wreck that IMAX glasses are or the double vision mess of the faulty type 2 glasses.
That’s a shame then since I was hoping they were going 2D here since they’d finally admitted they didn’t coat the right lenses properly here.
As far as the blue light goes, I always sit dead center for 3D stuff and on a screen like this I’d never sit lower 1/3. Where I was the blue light stuff could not be seen (that said the blacks didn’t seem quite as utterly pitch as they did up in Reading where they really, really turn the house lights down old school, they just had the barest hints of lights on a few steps, it was awesomely dark like before everyone because paranoid of lawsuits for people tripping).
I’m surprised you could clearly see your own reflection since they glasses are so close they are too close for an eye too focus on, maybe you means something slightly different and maybe it only happens with bad seats like off to the edge (always terrible idea for any 3D movie just in general since it tends to confuse the eyes since the 3D projection was programmed for a head on view so it can cause eye fatigue or feel slightly off in an indescribable way) and way up front (maybe being that close lets the screen reflect into your eyes more off the lenses?). Whatever the case I didn’t see that with type 1 or type 2 glasses (I did see tons of reflections at Reading BEFORE the house ceiling lights got turned off, but who cares at that point, once they turned it off to start the movie it was just perfection).
I just wish to hell they had stuck with the type 1 glasses which gave a truly awesome, utterly perfect experience. Went from hands down the best, most revolutionary projection experience to a total mess with the faulty type 2 glasses and the ridiculously skinny little part in the center they coated the right lenses. I know the coatings are expensive but come on, cover the lens.
alpinedownhiller – there are two problems with reflections in the new laser IMAX installation, from my experience.
The first problem is that the entrances to the left and right of the screen have blue lights installed on the floor and walls – this blue light remains on, unchanged, throughout the entire presentation. Though the light is technically in the hallway and not the auditorium, the light spills into the auditorium and the lower third of both sides of the screen ends up having blue light shining on it throughout the movie.
The second problem is with the glasses themselves. The coating on the lens is highly reflective, and the glasses pick up everything, from the blue light spilling in, to light from the screen reflecting back into your eyes. Many patrons, myself included, have reported being able to see the reflections of their own faces and eyeballs in the glasses. This did not ever happen with the previous 15/70 film system or DLP xenon digital projection.
The solution to the first problem is simple; dim or turn off the blue light in the hallways during the feature. I spoke with the IMAX CQO who unfortunately does not seem to have the authority to make this change; he acknowledged that it was an issue that bothered him but seemed resigned to that being the way it was. As for the glasses, IMAX seems aware of the issue and says they are working on a solution, but no timetable was offered.
Regarding the showings of films in 2D or 3D, a lot of that is up to the studio. I was told that the Lego Batman Movie is being offered exclusively in IMAX 2D at the request of the studio. Internationally, it is playing in IMAX 3D as 3D seems to be more popular overseas.
I don’t get what the reflection talk is about since a proper laser imax shuts all house lights off. And I see many it turns out where complaing about reflections from people’s cellphones but come on that is the obnoxious cell phone user’s fault, not the glasses. That is distacting as heck even when not wearing glasses at all.
All it lead is them switching from awesome gen one glasses to messed up gen two glasses.
@hdtv267 – what he said is relevant since it means that one theater is showing it in 2D and one 3D so maybe it adds to the speculation that there is a specific reason they are not showing it 3D at this one, i.e. some issues with the glasses maybe.
The Laser IMAX 3D with the gen one glasses at Jordan’s Boston was AMAZING though. Bar none far and away the best 3D I’ve ever seen. For some reason the glasses, at least a good it seems, of the gen two glasses they gave to Lincoln Square IMAX have messed up right lenses. The coating only blocks the left eye signal in the center of the lens so if your eyes are narrow spaced the left side of the screen gets doubling, regular widish spaced then you see the edges of the screen doubled, wide spaced then maybe the right side looks a bit doubled.
They shoulda just stuck with the amazing gen one glasses. I"m telling you TFA in Laser 3D in Boston was mind blowingly good 3D. Absolutely zero ghosting, amazing detail, great color, fantastic blacks, wide dynamic range, just the most natural 3D I’ve ever seen bar none. Literally like you were wearing no glasses and just there.
But they messed up at least some, maybe most to all of the glasses at this install, bad right lenses as best as I could tell. A shame since the laser install and screen and all seem to be working fine.
^ maybe that’s why there were so few 3D screenings of ‘Fantastic Beasts’ at Udvar Hazy … [shrugs] … I’ve never noticed the reflective glasses issue and any other flaws over at either of the Smithsonian IMAX-laser setups.
Lincoln square is 100% completed imo, it’s the problems of laser IMAX. Other Laser IMAX theaters are also showing lego in 2D and will show Beauty and the Beasts in 2D for most of the show times. I think the IMAX corporation just realized how bad their 3D glasses are. I didn’t care about digital IMAX 2D or 3D before, but now I don’t want to see another movie in that heavy refelective glasses anymore.
Has anyone been to the imax lately? With lego batman not in 3d, makes me think this theater isn’t fully done renovating it’s laser imax. I’m just gonna say it, it seems like they rushed the job to get it ready for star wars to make the most $, but failed in not providing the quality IMAX deserves. They need to take a few weeks off imo to finish up the theater.
I was invited to and attended an early screening of xXx: Return of Xander Cage at the IMAX here tonight. As usual with these early screenings where best seats are reserved for press and/or people involved with the film, regular people usually don’t get the best seats, and so I was in row D, maybe 7 seats from the aisle on the left. With the glasses I had a bit more issue than with Rogue One but again less than Force Awakens, as I did get reflections not from the movie but two times people in my row checked their phones (not ideal, but certainly something which happens in real world setting) and if I turned my head to the side I did get ghosting (which I tried out during the opening credits sequence), though as long as I kept my head relatively still (wasn’t too hard for me) the 3D was strong and problem free.
Still, this does suggest sitting towards the middle of the row and not too close to the screen is ideal (I’d already recommend that for any movie, 3D or 2D, on a screen of this size), and I will again say with this film that IMAX Laser picture and sound quality was outstanding.
Yeah, no significant ghosting with Rogue One. As far as seating goes, I think I was 6 or 7 rows back and pretty close to the middle of the screen (maybe slightly to the left, but not by much). I am a bit concerned about these issues if you had them and I did at another theater. If the final Resident Evil plays here (set to be in IMAX, but don’t think locations/showtimes are announced yet) I’ll see that and look out for good seating and these issues.
As far as reflections, I did notice the Boston glasses seemed very reflective and recall being worried at first, with the house lights up it seemed worrisome, but then when the movie started they turned off every single last light to zero and it was like pitch black at that theater so no issues whatsoever.
At Lincoln Square they seemed reflective, maybe a bit less so though than Boston I think, but it was a year apart, can’t be sure, the Boston glasses might have been smaller and a bit more reflective but man they worked so much better and with the lights all off who cares about the reflections IMO. They also made it pretty dark here too, don’t recall seeing any lights in my direct line of view at all. I think they kept a few dark ones in the stairs on but couldn’t see them from our dead center (and 2 rows from the back) seats. So I had zero reflection problems here with the movie going.
Maybe the SanFran theater kept some of the line of sight lights on and that gave you the trouble there.
@xbs2034 – huh but no bad ghosting and dbl images or loss of detail etc at Rogue one here at all? Not maybe sitting off to the left and forced to look through them to the right (which might mask some of the issue)?
Ah man, if you actually had working glasses then I’m really bummed I hadn’t known what was going on in time to get new pairs and see if they worked. Had really been looking forward to this (plus the expense and trouble of getting to NYC) so quite the bummer. Was really counting on a great experience, biggest Star Wars fan around. :(
Anyway I’d still be cautious about this theater for now. We had two for two identically bum glasses and even if ‘only’ 50% of the glasses here are bum that would mean we had only ¼ chance to both get bum pairs so I wonder if maybe even more than 50% are bum. Who knows. Darn.
@alpinedownhiller- the two issues I had with the laser glasses in SF were the size and I got a small reflection effect with my prescription glasses in the brightest shots (not often, maybe a half dozen times throughout the movie)
I also had a lot of difficulty with the new 3D glasses. They weren’t physically uncomfortable to wear, but they were highly reflective – so reflective that I saw everything. Besides the 3D image on the screen, every bit of stray light in the theater (like the blue light that spills in from the entranceways to the side of the screen) reflected off the lenses. My own eyes and face reflected within the glasses.
When they showed trailers in 2D, the image was fine, but the 3D glasses ended up reflecting every single bit of stray light in the theater and ended up reflecting the sides of my face into the lenses too.
I wrote to the IMAX CQO using the email address provided at the end of the feature (they put this onscreen at the end of every IMAX showing), and they conceded that they were aware of the issue with the glasses and hoped to make improvements in the future, but didn’t have an immediate fix either.
I’ve simply never experienced a glasses issue like this with any other 3D showing using any other 3D technology at any other venue. Not at home on my active TV and projector, not at RealD theaters with circular polarization, not at digital and film venues with linear polarization, and not even at Dolby Digital 3D venues which use similar lens technology but smaller lenses.
I think what happened was that IMAX wanted to have larger lenses that the standard Dolby 3D glasses so they enlarged the eye holes (on standard Dolby 3D glasses, the viewable area is much smaller), but the lens material is so reflective that with the increased size, they’re just reflecting everything. It’s probably something that wasn’t as apparent in a test environment but is unavoidable in the real world.
Still, for $26 a ticket, I expected more.
Laser 3D also should have no problems since polarization isn’t involved AFAIK. Laser lets you send out light at a very specific frequency so they can construct multiple sets of primaries that are fairly similar and, AFAIK, they use notch filters to filter out the specific primaries they use for R,G and B (and they might even use two sets of similar for each eye at least to try to get around metameric differences between people’s eyes to try to insure someone with odd cones doesn’t get left out) for the left eye signal from the right and vice versa. I could swing my head all over the place and looking through my left eye only here saw no ghosting. So you can send out strong signals, with no compromise, to each eye and just notch out 100% the left eye image from the right and vice-versa in a way that the polarized screens never quite manage. The single frequency a laser can send out lets them be able to make a basically 100% filter without having any noticeable damage to color fidelity. Unless they ended up doing something different in the end. (of course it is a bit trickier than it sounds since the eye’s response is tricky and varies a bit person to person so they probably had to do lots of tuning and testing and maybe send out double sets of primaries to each maybe and so on)
And in Boston, where the glasses seemed to be properly coated, strongly and fully edge to edge across both left and right eye lenses, it was just perfect, not even a trace of ghosting. Even regular IMAX Xenon 3D has tiny faint traces of ghosting even sitting ideally (although in most theaters it seems less to me than with Real 3D; as for Doldby 3D supposedly they don’t use polarization and use the method you mention, but I was pretty disappointed in it the one time I went, colors didn’t seem rich, contrast and brightness poor, I liked Real3D better for sure and IMAX 3D much better and in some ways IMAX 15/70 3D better still (although was mixed compared to IMAX 3D) but none of them come close to the Boston Laser 3D IMAX, that is just perfection (and I think Lincoln Square would be the same if the right lenses in some to many of the glasses here were not messed up and had the proper right eye filter coating across the entire lens and not just the center, since the 3D seemed perfect and ghost free center and right side of the screen).
So they
Just as a side comment, if you remember the days of 35mm interlocked projector 3-D in the early ‘50’s, all of the complaints raised about digital 3-D were true then. If you turned your head slightly you’d lose the separation created by the Polarized light. In order to maintain the separation the screens had to be high gain and thus could display a “hot spot” when viewed off axis as well a significant light drop off in wide auditoriums or ones with a steep projection angle (that was one of the reasons the Radio City Music Hall scrapped the plan to show “Kiss Me Kate” in 3-D. They would have lost too many seats at the sides and top of the mezzanines.) Many of those conditions exist with digital 3-D as well. One exception is Dolby Digital 3-D which uses a very sophisticated variation on anaglyph 3-D. It can be projected on a matte white screen and not lose separation between the eyes. The trade off is that it does require more light than those systems which use high gain screens. With all of the digital 3-D systems the registration is better than could be achieved with two 35mm machines, and of course, there’s no mechanical motion problem such as weave to cause problems between the two images being seen as one. Digital 3-D just copied a lot of what was developed in the '50’s for film 3-D. Another case of “everything old is new again”.
I remember when we ran the original Star Wars in 1977 at the GCC Menlo Park Twin. Those were some days that will never ever be duplicated
@xbs2034 – what did you hate about the glasses in SF? just the small lens size (and maybe the rims cutting off FOV if you say close??) or actual visual artifacts? (I could be wrong but I thought the glasses at the Boston one had been even smaller than the ones here, but sitting near the back of the theater the small size didn’t impact anything and the way the high quality lenses just showed an utterly perfect 3D image like I’ve never seen before so I way prefer those ones)
And you really saw no double images at Rogue One here? Nothing weird at all? Not even at the edges? Were you sitting in the center (or maybe way to the left and thus naturally kind of looking sideways to the right?)?
If I turned my head even a touch to look towards the right side the double images would be over the entire left side of the screen. Some scenes hid it to an extent and you might not realize there was doubling going on or just think the area was a little blurry or OOF or something but closing one eye and then the other eye you could see all sorts of patterns and texture were doubled with the right eye and when it came to bright lines and stars it was pretty darn clear that with one eye you see a line and a star and then with the other eye you’d see two stars in the same area and two sets of lines, not all that subtle either so not like that very faint ghosting you often see in any regular 3D (15/70 3D, IMAX Xenon, Real3D, etc.) across the frame. Maybe if someone wasn’t paying attention they just think it’s a jubmle or stars and lines and textures all over and somehow not realize there is double imaging going on, espcially if they didn’t realize how utterly 100.00% perfect from ANY hint ghosting or artifact of any type laser imax 3D is when viewed with properly made glasses.
Just wondering if they actually do have some good glasses here. Sure wishing if good glasses do exist here I had known and kept going back until I got good ones at the start.
Currently I couldn’t recommend the IMAX here for 3D since I don’t trust the odds to get a good pair and to have to dash back and forth possibly trying 2,3,10,20 pairs during the short 3D previews and the start of feature film would be an annoying mess.
Unless our luck was so monstrously bad that they only have like say 20 bad pairs out of 480 or something and we got 2 of the 20.
@makrp – you can laugh at digital 3D and digital in general, but let me tell you the laser IMAX 3D they have up Boston with the glasses there was utterly mind-blowing, so far superior to 15/70 3D, better contrast, better brightness with darks probably even darker, zero ghosting, the 3D was so utterly naturally and smooth like infinite levels of subtle depth you literally felt like you were not wearing glasses and simply there in person on scene in a way I’ve just never felt with Real 3D/Dolby 3D/IMAX 15/70 3D/IMAX Digital Xenon 3D, even more subtle as well as richer colors; it was the most mind-blowing revolutionary new feeling I’d had in a theater since my first 3D movie ever (Avatar in 15/70 3D) and the original Star Wars on a giant screen with 70mm projection and Dolby Surround way back in ‘77 in the huge 2000 seat Stanley Warner Paramus.
but as with anything things can be messed up, I’ve seen there are a couple auditoriums at my local theater where the regular digital projectors appear to become uncalibrated and they have a bit of loss of detail and color fringing; but don’t forget the ways film projection could be messed up at times and the the way prints would look so faded so quickly so there was always the rush to get in a good viewing right away, with digital you can still enjoy the same quality if you go back and get in a final viewing 4 weeks later as on the first few days. And the 4k projectors when given 4k material definitely show more detail than the 35mm projection ever did (unless maybe you are some big wig and get a special more direct copy print unlike any regular theater ever gets and even then the detail would be probably the same at best even if a K64/K25 slide might have more tha 8MP detail but you never get to see that projected as a movie).
and sadly, at least with the glasses we got for Rogue One at Lincoln yesterday. I wish I knew it was the glasses that were the issue earlier on and had run back and tried a bunch more pairs. It seemed too disruptive to try that half way in and with my friends pair seeming the same I had figured all were bad, but maybe not.
Also, film also can and has been shown in 3D and you get into wanting to be centered in the theater and so on there too. And the new laser imax can also do 2D of course and even here with the 3D sadly messed up (at least for some decent number of the glasses here) and i haven’t seen 2D laser imax ever get messed up (not that I’ve seen it a lot).
@markp, as I said I get the love for film, especially as a capture method but even in projection I would still like to see film prints from time to time. The problem is nowadays you basically need to see a brand new print at a special venue to find pristine quality and people who can project it right. In places with very talented protectionists like Film Forum, Museum of the Moving Image, and NYFF, new prints can look great but often archival ones have damage either from someone else or just normal wear and tear, and in the years where the industry was heavily transitioning to digital projection but still could find plenty of new releases projecting on film (basically 2010-2013) the difference was apparent with film prints usually having significant scratches and faded colors even for titles 1-3 weeks into their release.
Not to say digital projection can’t have problems (I’ve had bad showings, and like with film the risk increases with multiplexes vs special venues), but the number of times I’ve seen significant projection issues has gone down in recent years, and IMAX laser and even a regular 4K projector are capable of producing high quality images that means image detail and sharpness doesn’t have to be compromised for the stability and print savings of digital.