Mondo Knows Facts
Cinema screen brightness is measured in foot-lamberts
A meter aimed at a white screen reports how much light reaches the audience A foot-lambert describes the light reflected from a surface, and cinema standards set a target of roughly 14 for film presentation. Projectionists measure it at the centre and edges of the screen to catch a dull lamp or dirty port glass. Digital cinema uses the same target, quoted as 48 candelas per square metre. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Carbon arc lamps lit early cinema screensTwo carbon rods burned inside a housing to throw a fierce white beamA platter holds the entire feature on one reelThe print is spliced into a single strand and fed from a turntableA Geneva mechanism stops the film between framesA rotating pin turns the sprocket a quarter turn, then releases it to restPolarised glasses give each eye a separate imageTwo projectors send light polarised at right angles, so each lens blocks the otherDolby Atmos treats sounds as movable objectsThe mix stores a position for each sound rather than assigning it a speakerArchives keep projectors for long dead formatsA print in 9.5mm or 28mm is unplayable without a machine built for it
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Tags: projection, standards, cinema
Cinema screen brightness is measured in foot-lamberts: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- A meter aimed at a white screen reports how much light reaches the audience. The figure is taken from SMPTE, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a movies & tv fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.