So I work as a Technical Manager for a small independent cinema - I run the shows, do the maintenance, repairs, calibrations that sort of thing. As a small independent, we would have never been able to outright buy Digital Cinema equipment - each screen of gear is around £150,000 to £200,000 to fit out. That's a lot of dosh.
So, we signed up to a funding partnership called a VPF. I wont get into it, but essentially its a finance deal that is paid off over a 10 year period, during which the equipment is covered by a NOC and essentially unlimited free replacement parts on any non consumable modules.
Most Digital Cinema, if it is based on DLP (Barco, NEC, Kinoton and some Chritie's) is licensed from and in many cases actually manufactured by Texas Instruments. The Essential "guts" of a DLP cinema projector are more or less identical regardless of brand. They even use some of the same firmware modules. Given its all licensed from TI and/or manufactured by only a handful of companies parts are expensive. Very expensive.
A typical projector has 5 to 6 individual electronic modules, most based on FPGAs, some on ARM cores, and each module has independent self-contained firmware/software packages. The complexity of the system is really quite astounding. Each module is on separate boards that can be individually replaced.
In the course of the 4 years we have had our gear, the projector has been virtually rebuilt with new parts at least 3 times. One module in particular is very prone to random, weird glitchy failures and on ours has been replaced 12 times. This module is £4000. 12 of them provided by our service provider...in 4 years.
Half the "broken" parts get recirculated as "reconditioned" but are usually faulty or DOA when supplied, so then the service provider has to source them straight form the manufacturer at their own cost.
Just this week, we have had to replace every board of any significance to nail down a random problem with the secure connection between the playback server. Every. Single. Board. Approx cost, who the heck knows. All this because, as it turns out, the Projector control board firmware does not interrogate a certain module and detect errors in the same way that the playback server does when it establishes its secure connection with the projector. It has the capability to do so, it has exactly the same connection to this particular module as the playback server, but nope, for whatever reason the firmware engineers just didn't implement the same level of checks. And because of this, you have the projector reporting no errors, and the server reporting a somewhat cryptic error that could mean anything between it and the module in question is faulty.
Half the time, when these boards are replaced during a fault finding mission they don't even ask me to replace the old ones that turn out to be fully functional and send the "new" ones back. We just get to keep whatever new parts they send us. Sometimes they don't even ask for the old stuff back. It is madness and I have no comprehension whatsoever how this company stays afloat let alone makes any kind of a profit.
And its not just me, pretty much every cinema I know with comparable equipment has the same sort of issues all the time. And most of them are under the same VPF service company. That's thousands of screens across Europe.
If someone has any idea how this is even financially viable for them or the manufacturer I would love to know....
Do you have any stories of warranty parts madness?