My love for home theater began in the mid 90’s after seeing such block busters movies as Braveheart and Titanic in the theaters and was blown away by the visuals and sound. These movies had an emotional impact on me, and I wanted to find away to bottle up the experience and bring it home. I knew my love for home theater had begun. The timing was right as the DVD format was just getting started. I was an early adoptor of the DVD format and purchased my first player in 1998 at a cost of $480.
Since that time I have upgraded from a 27” direct view television to a front projector displaying a 146” width (cinescope) image. I have always been a fan of the cinescope format, but always found the “black bars” on the top and bottom annoying. I remember wishing there was away to eliminate them and, at the same time, make use of all the pixels my projector had to offer.
The solution came in the yearly 2000’s, and a new term entered my vocabulary; anamorphic lens. The idea was that if you could digitally stretch your video signal vertically, the dreaded “black bars” would be removed. However, the image, since it had been vertically stretched, left everything looking tall and skinny. Now place the anamorphic lens in front of the projector such that the projector projects through the lens. The anamorphic lens horizontally expands the image and restores the image back to its proper aspect ratio; no longer leaving tall and skinny images, making use of all pixels from the projector, and doing away with the black bars. This process has been used in commercial theaters dating back to the 1950’s, but had not yet been available to the home theater market.
Today, commercially available anamorphic lenses are expensive, with costs that can equal greater than the digital projector itself. There are two families of anamorphic lenses: cylindrical and prism based. Cylindrical lenses are the most expensive and produce a near perfect anamorphic image. These lenses cost between $4k and $10k. Prism based lenses are less expensive, but can introduce certain image artifacts such as pin-cushioning, chromatic aberration, reflections, and focusing issues. Commercially available prism based anamorphic lenses cost around $1k+.
Since the price of cylindrical lenses is out of reach for many home theater enthusiasts, many have chosen to incorporate prism based lenses into their cinescope home theaters. Prism based lenses can vary in performance based on quality of prism, optical coatings, and chromatic aberration corrector elements. These features add hundreds of dollars to the price of the anamorphic lens, and while they do improve performance, many of these improvements may go completely unnoticed to the viewer who is immersed in the story of a movie. With the lowest cost prism based lens costing right around $1000, even prism based lenses are fairly expensive. The only way to have an anamorphic lens without these expensive upgrades is to build one your self. Directions for building “do-it-yourself” anamorphic lenses are readily available through the internet, and anyone handy with tools can create one for less than $100.
...
I built my first anamorphic lens in 2007. It looked rather rough on the outside, but it did the job with surprisingly good results, in fact I couldn’t believe that it worked as well as it did. I felt like I had acheived 95% of the impact of a commercially available lens for 10% of the cost. Over the last few years I have made some tweaks to my first design, and have added a few additional features. During this time I have also read numerous accounts of people wishing they had the time and/or skills required to build one of these lenses for themselves. I then decided that I would construct these lenses and make them available to anyone wishing they could have a cinescope theater setup. The result is the JTX Dual Prism Anamorphic Lens now available at a price of only $329.99 US. Finally, an affordable anamorphic lens!
