Workers at the Carmike 10 movie theater at Tanglewood Mall this week completed installation of 10 new digital projectors, marking a change from images stored on spools of film to movies conjured up from a hard drive.

Computer chips capable of reproducing up to 35 trillion colors power the Christie Digital Cinema projectors installed Tuesday.

"There's no jitters or jumps," said Dale Hurst, director of marketing for Carmike Cinemas. "There'll definitely be no fading or scratches."

But the switch from 35-mm projectors to digital equipment doesn't just represent a change from movie theater norms -- the nearest first-run feature film digital projector in Virginia is in Richmond, also at a Carmike theater -- it also means a break from more than a century of cinema presentation.

Hurst, a former projectionist who has worked in the theater business for 37 years, is not unhappy about that split.

"I spent many, many years running a projector, and I had to muscle those cans [of film] up and down those steps.

"On Thursday nights, we always had to stay late to put those things together," he added, referring to the process of "building up" a movie by assembling reels of film before openings. "It could take hours. Now all that's going to be instantaneous. Now it's just clicking and dragging."

Carmike, a motion picture exhibitor that has 302 theaters and 2,476 screens nationally, plans to convert about 2,300 standard projectors to digital over the next 22 months.

The Tanglewood theater will maintain two 35-mm projectors for some presentations. Hurst cited the upcoming film "The Nativity Story" as a movie that would not be released in the digital format and would require standard projection.

Eventually, he said, the movies will be beamed directly into the theaters via satellite and stored by a server.

"The way it's working right now, they send us the movie via hard drive and we inject it into the main server," he explained.

"There still needs to be a satellite dish installed," said Kevin Thomas, a district manager, who was not sure when the theater would be ready to receive transmissions. "There's not a definite timetable."

Thomas also said that the Salem Valley 8, another Carmike-owned theater, would make the switch to digital sometime in the spring.

Hurst said that eventually the system would allow his theaters to present more than just movies: "We're doing concerts, we're doing wrestling events. There are definitely plans to show it in Roanoke."

"I just went to an auditorium in Tennessee and watched a pro football game," he said, adding that some exhibitors even offer sports spectators the option of theaters in which alcohol is served and those in which it is not.

Despite the advantages of the new technology, some in the business have less enthusiasm for it.

"Until Hollywood makes it more affordable," said Cindy Hubble, general manager of the Abingdon Cinemall theater in Washington County, "it's really difficult for independent theaters to pay for digital projectors."

Though Hubble said she's not averse to technology -- in fact, the Abingdon Cinemall is an independent theater equipped with a Hyperdrive Sound System designed by Dolby Laboratories, and a digital projector used for nontheatrical releases -- she said that the presentation of a 35-mm movie "is one of those fine arts."

"If you take care of your prints, you can get the same effect," she said.