Coming to a digital cinema near you, although not soon

It took three years for the studios to agree on a format, and it will probably take another two years to reach the nation’s 36,000 movie screens, but the all-digital cinema–long-awaited by some, long-dreaded by others–finally became a reality this week. A consortium of the major Hollywood studios announced Wednesday that the technical specifications for projecting movies not on celluloid, but from digital servers, are now in place, with testing of the new system next year, and a rollout that is expected to cost $3 billion to follow in 2007.