A standards agreement on the horizon?

Laura Holson of the New York Times writes today that we're on the verge of an announcement about digital cinema standards from Digital Cinema Initiatives, a consortium of the major studios.

I'm keeping an eye out for the actual announcement, because the Times story is a bit confusing:

"...Studio executives agreed that the projectors should not only have digital capabilities now, but be compatible with higher resolution, next-generation projectors." Somehow, I doubt that the first-generation of digital 2K projectors (2k refers to an image that is 2048 pixels across by 1080 high; 4k offers double the visual clarity, with 4096 pixels horizontally and 2160 vertically) will be capable of being upgraded to 4k once they're deployed; that'd be like upgrading your Chevy to a BMW without taking it out of your garage. The servers, on the other hand, which store digital cinema files and feed them to the projector, will likely be capable of handling both 2k and 4k files.

Holson continues: "Financing, a major sticking point between movie theater owners and the movie studios, is still being worked out."

True. That's at least as important to the digital cinema roll-out as technical standards.