The screen is not
the picture

Usually you can't tell from the booking page, which is the problem this site exists to solve. Look the venue up here and check the projection line. If a cinema has laser it tends to advertise it — but silence is not a xenon detector. For 219 venueswe say the generation isn't established, because the only thing claiming xenon is a 2021 listing and the screen is wider than that system was sold for.

No — a bigger screen showing a shorter picture can give you less than a smaller screen that fits its projector, which is exactly what happens in Glasgow. What matters is the lit area, and how much of your field of view it fills from your seat.

Substantially. Across the 41 venues showing The Odyssey in 70mm, the film print puts up an average of 31% more picture than the digital showing in the same room — and at most of them it is a clean 33%, because the print fills the full height of a screen the digital projector can only partly light.

An enthusiast term for a small screen sold at IMAX prices. We only apply it to screens we have actually measured, under 16 m wide — roughly the smallest tenth of the network. The median IMAX screen is 20 m, so flagging everything below that would mean nothing.

Because we are not certain about the projector. Most of our projection data traces to an industry listing that closed in 2021, and IMAX has converted a great many screens to laser since. Where we cannot confirm it from a current source, the score is marked provisional rather than presented as exact.

We don't know, and neither does any source we have. IMAX screens are characteristically curved — it is part of how the format fills your vision — but the industry listing we work from records only whether a venue is a dome or not. It says nothing about the curvature of the rest.

So our venue pages say “not a dome” rather than “flat”, because claiming a screen is flat would be claiming something nobody told us.

No. Some of the best rooms on this site are science centres and museums that run forty-minute documentaries and never take a commercial release — two of them score in the top tier. The IQ score rates the auditorium, not the programme, so where we know a venue doesn't show features we say so on its page and in the list.

We hold that answer for 270venues, from the same database that gives us projector detail. For the rest, check the venue's own listings before travelling.

Not in a way that compares cleanly. We work a dome's area out from its diameter using a fixed assumption about how much of the hemisphere carries picture — a convention, not a measurement — and a dome wraps above and behind you rather than sitting in front of you. A 680 m² dome and a 680 m² flat screen are not the same experience, and we don't pretend the numbers are interchangeable. Dome venue pages say so.

It depends entirely on the projector, and this is the thing regulars complain about most. 3D glasses cut a lot of the light reaching your eyes, so a 3D show is always dimmer than the same film flat. On a laser system that is usually fine. On an ageing xenon lamp it can be genuinely murky — dim enough that people walk out feeling they were sold something.

We don't score this, because there is no published measured brightness per venue to score it with. But if a venue's projector line says xenon, a 2D showing is the safer ticket.

Not inherently, and several are among the best rooms anywhere. They do tend to be older, which cuts both ways: many kept 15/70mm film long after multiplexes stripped it out, while others were converted to digital and left with a tall screen they can no longer fill.