You probably associate cinemas with projectors, but Samsung has other ideas – at CinemaCon, the largest and most important gathering of movie theater owners, the company showed off its Onyx Cinema LED screens.
These come in a variety of sizes: 5m, 10m, 14m and 20m (16ft, 33ft, 46ft and 66ft). And there are additional scaling options to match the needs of different movie theaters.
The displays offer a peak brightness of 300 nits (86.7fL), which is six times brighter than the standard (48 nits/14fL). The displays support video up to 4K 120Hz. Note that the displays are pieced together from several panels like this one, which measures 10m (in TV terms, it is 455”). For 3D movies, Samsung claims that Onyx minimizes the flickering that is sometimes seen with projector systems.
Theater owners saw screenings of several films on the Samsung Onyx, including Inside Out 2 and the upcoming Elio (2025) from Pixar. “The color and vibrancy are very rich. On the Onyx display, there are details of the characters shown that I haven’t seen on a screen before,” said Cynthia Lusk, Director of Creative Film Services and International Production at Pixar Studios.
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A scene from Inside Out 2 on the Samsung Onyx Cinema screen
Samsung has already sold the Onyx to several partners like Cannon Beach in Mesa, Arizona where LVL 11 Entertainment is building a movie theater. It will open in the fall, you can see the plan for one of the auditoriums below:
Additionally, Samsung builds a variety of displays to be used outside the auditorium itself: color e-paper signage, digital kiosks and menu boards.
Samsung e-paper signage • Digital kiosks • Menu boards
For audio, the Onyx screens have native support for Harman’s JBL surround sound tech (Samsung owns Harman, so no surprise here), but it can also work with Dolby Atmos, Meyer Sound, QSC and even custom sound systems.
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