Wondering why d2?
Short for Digital Darwin.
A name picked on purpose, on the eighth of August 2000, for an industry built to adapt, evolve and lead. This is the idea behind it.
A struggle for existence
Only the fittest survive. The screen is no exception.
Charles Darwin (1809 to 1882) described a world where species keep adapting to a changing environment, and the ones that grow in a profitable direction, learn new skills and find new ways to cooperate and compete come out ahead. A struggle for existence, won by the adaptable. More than a century and a half later, his idea reads like a description of business in the digital age.
Why cinema
We chose the industry that keeps reinventing itself.
d2, aka Digital Darwin, was founded on 8 August 2000 by James Troch to help the entertainment business through exactly that struggle. We picked cinema because cinema keeps proving the theory right. It adapts, it evolves, and it still fills a dark room with strangers who feel the same thing at the same time.
Twenty-five years of reinvention
Every few years, the screen raised its own bar.
Each one pushed the craft forward. The industry answered with hard work, creativity, passion and perseverance, and we are proud to have spent the journey in the projection booth, keeping the picture and the sound a step ahead.
A short history of cinema projection and sound, with d2 in it
Cinema has reinvented its picture and its sound every few years since 1895. d2 (Digital Darwin), a cinema projection and sound integrator founded in Beveren, Belgium on 8 August 2000, has spent that journey in the projection booth. These are the milestones, in order.
- 1895: Cinema is born (Projection). The Lumiere brothers project moving pictures to a paying audience in Paris. A room, a light, a screen.
- 1900s–20s: The 35mm projector takes hold (Projection). Hand-cranked, then motor-driven 35mm projectors make the picture house a fixture of every town.
- 1927: The screen finds its voice (Sound). Vitaphone sound-on-disc and then optical sound-on-film end the silent era. The room has to be heard, not just seen.
- 1930s: Carbon-arc light (Projection). Carbon-arc lamps throw enough light to fill ever larger screens, the workhorse of projection for decades.
- 1935: Full colour arrives (Projection). Three-strip Technicolor reaches the feature with Becky Sharp. Skies and skin tones in true colour.
- 1952: The widescreen spectacle (Projection). Cinerama spreads three projectors across a vast curved screen, answering television with sheer scale.
- 1953: Anamorphic widescreen (Projection, Sound). CinemaScope squeezes a wide image onto 35mm, paired with four-track magnetic stereo behind the screen.
- 1955: 70mm and six-track sound (Projection, Sound). Todd-AO arrives with Oklahoma!, a single 70mm strip and six channels of magnetic sound.
- 1970: Large format (Projection). IMAX 15/70 debuts, the largest, sharpest image a room can hold.
- 1977: Dolby Stereo (Sound). Affordable optical stereo reaches ordinary cinemas, and Star Wars makes four-channel sound the thing to have.
- 1992: Digital surround (Sound). Dolby Digital brings discrete 5.1 to the multiplex, debuting on Batman Returns.
- 1993: DTS in the room (Sound). Jurassic Park lands with DTS, its footsteps and roars carried on a separate digital track.
- 1999: Cinema goes digital (Projection). The first DLP digital projection, Star Wars Episode I. The reel of film begins its long retirement.
- 2000: d2 opens its doors (d2). We start integrating projection and sound for cinemas, right as the industry steps into the digital age.
- 2005: The DCI standard, and 4K (Projection). Digital cinema gets its specification, and 4K projection follows. The rollout from film begins in earnest.
- 2009: Digital 3D goes mainstream (Projection). Avatar fills rooms worldwide and gives audiences a reason to leave the living room again.
- 2012: Object-based audio (Sound). Dolby Atmos lifts sound off fixed channels and places it anywhere in the room, starting with Brave.
- 2014: RGB laser projection (Projection). Laser light replaces the lamp. IMAX with Laser and Laser by Barco bring brighter images and wider colour.
- 2015: Dolby Cinema (Projection, Sound). Dolby Vision laser projection and Dolby Atmos together set a premium-room standard.
- 2024–26: HDR comes to the screen (Projection). Barco LS4K Lightsteering and HDR by Barco bring real high dynamic range to cinema.
- Today: The room you tune (Now). 4K laser, HDR and immersive sound, measured and calibrated for one specific auditorium. The work continues.
The most astounding fact
A cinema throws light on a wall, and a room full of strangers feels as one.
The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was once asked for the most astounding fact about the universe. His answer was about connection: the atoms in our bodies were forged in long-dead stars, so we are not simply in the universe, the universe is in us.
A great screening does something close to that. For two hours it makes a crowd breathe together. That feeling is worth protecting, and it is worth getting right. So we keep evolving the room, faster than the living room can. Survival of the fittest, on the big screen.
James Troch, founder