The quarterly financial report is out and IMAX has signed contracts for 36 theaters, including 23 across Europe, in the first quarter.

It’s good financial news but not the 2014 news the industry is waiting for. Since IMAX bought the Kodak 3D patents, it has been busy with its own digital 3D two-projector/polarizing filter regime that no one has yet seen. Whatever IMAX does should be a huge boost to high-lumen laser projection.

The famous IMAX ‘GT’ 1570 film projector, the one reserved for only the biggest IMAX screens, projects large format film known as 1570, or 15 ‘perf’ / 70 mm (which refers to the size of the film frame). This film frame is 10x larger than that of traditional cinema film (the 35 mm). The IMAX GT projector demands two 15,000-watt, water-cooled Xenon lamps to project the large film frame onto the giant screen.

When the cinema industry transitioned from using film to using digital (impacting the availability of movie content in the large IMAX 1570 film format), IMAX went in for an interim solution: an IMAX Digital projector system [a twin system is shown in the photo here].

Many IMAX theater owners now await the 2014 release of IMAX’s new digital laser system. Retiring those Xenon lamps, it will use a laser light engine to project an image on-screen.

Some owners are already committed to install a new IMAX Laser system late in 2014, which is why everybody is on the look-out for the first peek.

For more information on IMAX’s Q1 results, click here.

This article originally appeared in rAVe Europe.