Odeon Orpington
High Street,
Orpington,
BR6 0TW
High Street,
Orpington,
BR6 0TW
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Related Websites
Odeon Cinemas Group (Official)
Additional Info
Operated by: Odeon Cinemas Group
Functions: Movies (First Run)
Phone Numbers:
Box Office:
440333.006.7777
Nearby Theaters
Now a district of south east Greater London, Orpington had been without a cinema since the Commodore Cinema closed in 1982. That was finally rectified on Friday 26th February 2016, when this seven screen Odeon opened in the new town centre Walnut Shopping Centre, situated on the site of a former job centre.
Odeon had exchanged contracts in July 2013, but the development was held up when insufficient businesses were willing to rent the units around the cinema: 60% had to be pre-let before construction could start. As a result, the proposed 2014 opening date was missed.
The first-floor foyer and auditoriums are accessed by escalator or lift. As with most current multiplexes, tickets are sold at the concession counters. There is a Croma Pizza Point, with an adjacent seating area.
The total seating capacity is 941: Screen 1: 64 seats; Screen 2: 184; Screen 3: 98; Screen 4: 276; Screen 5: 86; Screen 6: 92 and Screen 7: 141. In addition, all have at least two wheelchair spaces.
All have Digital AES Sound. Screen 4, the largest, presents the ODEON ISENSE experience. According to Odeon, this entails “A super-sized, floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall screen, with a state-of-the-art 4K digital projector that delivers almost 9m pixels, four times the resolution of a standard screen, so the film is brighter, clearer and alive with detail. Combined with Dolby Atmos, a sound system that introduces a powerful new listening experience, ISENSE is an incredible experience that will blow you away.” This was the second ODEON ISENSE installation, the first being at Birmingham Broadway Plaza.
On the first two days, Friday and Saturday 26th and 27th February, all tickets for all shows were just £2.00. Needless to say, most of the screenings quickly sold out. It is hoped that the good folk of Orpington will continue to support this well-appointed new cinema.
Contributed by
David Simpson
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Recent comments (view all 6 comments)
Odeon launching limitless subscriptions scheme this week as well
The September 2016 issue Cinema Technology Magazine has an article on the Odeon Orpington on p72.
The article says that the iSENSE screen is masked, and has a “56 channel” Dolby Atoms installation, with 18 ceiling speakers. Screens are Harkness Clarus 170 with RealD used for 3D. LuiS WaSSman amplifiers/speakers are used throughout, with Dolby CP750/850 processors.
All seating is “premier.”
This is currently the only purpose-built multiplex in all of the London Borough of Bromley (pop. ~300,000); a long time coming with various proposed schemes, notably the Crystal Palace megaplex which never came to fruition! An oddity in area with many leafy well-heeled districts.
With a new 9-screen cinema (Westmoreland Road redevelopment) in Bromley town centre under construction, this situation has rapidly changed.
Details on the audio system are on LW Speakers' site.
For the iSense (Atmos) screen:
Screen speakers: 5x LW 5109-BI (4-way) 4x LW 6117 21" subwoofers
Surround speakers: 6x LW 7517 V2 subwoofers 27x LW 7017HD surrounds 19x LW 7609 ceiling speakers (coaxial)
LW’s own amplifiers are used in all auditoria (MUK and EK V2 series.)
As each of the LW 6117 units contains two 21" drivers, in the iSense auditorium the LFE channel is reproduced using eight 21" drivers, equivalent in surface area to 16 18" drivers.
At least at the Odeon Orpington iSense screen, it looks like the days of the “local” cinema using conked out old Altecs, or otherwise underspecified systems, are well and truly over.
Visited Odeon Orpington today to see “First Man” in the iSense (Screen 4) auditorium. The movie was disappointing, but intelligible and watchable.
This cinema was built as part of an extension to “The Walnuts Shopping Centre,” which, put politely, is a secondary location. The centre is partially covered; access to the cinema is outdoors, and opposite is a branch of “Poundland”! Value retailers can be places to find products at competitive prices, of course—but it is not a glamorous setting for a cinema.
However, all is forgotten on entering the cinema, via a small lobby onto escalators to the first floor main foyer. The foyer and lobby areas look better “in person” than in photos I’ve seen to date—they are bright and clean, but the added touches—such as the blue concealed LED lighting—add the necessary sparkle. All of the blue LED strips seem to have been placed in extrusions, the result being very even light output, competitive with cold cathode strips, rather than the patchy effect sometimes seen.
Due to tiredness, I found myself buying a large Coke Zero, for which I was charged, IIRC, £4.30(!)
All staff were friendly and efficient.
As mentioned in a previous post, the cinema was the subject of a Cinema Technology Magazine (as it was then known) article, September 2016 issue; the previous link no longer works—however, this issue has been reposted.
A minor quibble: when trying to book tickets, on proceeding to card payment, the website returned. Unfortunately, on reattempting the booking, the seats that I had selected were still shown as unavailable; therefore, as I preferred centre-row seats, I had to select seats in the next row (i.e. closer to the screen,) and as this happened several times, the final seats booked were closer to the screen than the original selection.
Fortunately, these seats turned out to be, if on the low side, a suitable distance from the screen—however, I had hoped to sit further back, in order to be in or near the “sweet spot” for the Dolby Atmos sound system.
Entering the iSense auditorium and being seated, the impression was that, although decoratively a “black box” auditorium, I had entered a “real” cinema—one that had been thoughtfully designed. Whilst the screen (nor auditorium width) was not on quite the same scale, it almost felt like I had entered a modern version of the Odeon Marble Arch! (N.B. The screen is ~49ft. wide, and was sufficiently large, but not in the “giant” category as found in the BFI IMAX or Cineworld (Empire) Leicester Square IMAX.)
The row spacing provided fairly generous legroom, and the black “leather” seating was clearly of a very high quality; however the lack of “rocker” capability, I thought, made them slightly uncomfortable, and the seating is not as wide as I would have liked.
The ceiling lights use a “honeycomb” design and are not too bright or distracting when lowered for the main feature, and they were gradually dimmed, IIRC, through the adverts and trailers.
Where adverts and trailers were in scope format, these suffered from being “letterboxed;” however, if I’m not mistaken, moveable masking is installed, and the screen definitely opened up for the main feature to full width, making full use of its height.
A Dolby Atmos trailer was played before the main feature.
Picture quality was very good; the screen is slightly curved, and tilted upwards, and as far as I could tell did not have the curved “chamfered” corners that many “floating” screens suffer from. Brightness was sufficient, and the calibration/alignment seemed excellent, with accurate colours and almost perfect geometry with no, or virtually no, “smiley face” barrel distortion towards the bottom of the screen.
However, the black level was not comparable to laser light source projection (nor high-end OLED TVs), and there was a fair degree of clipping of low level detail. Further, the expanded gamut potential of such systems was, of course, not on display here, either—a shame that the cinema was built on the cusp of the wider rollout of laser light source projection.
The Clarus XC screen installed is suitable for polarised 3D, as well as 2D, and this was a 2D presentation. Uniformity seemed pretty good; but the end credits revealed that, for my seating position, the centre to bottom edge of the screen was brighter than the rest.
The sound system (specifications in previous post) was excellent, with good timbre matching between the fronts, rears, sides and overheads. It was clean and bright sounding, with plenty of headroom, reaching high sound pressure levels without strain, including right down to the bottom octaves. However, it did seem to be playing at slightly less than reference level.
Acoustics were also very good, affording excellent dialogue intelligibility and imaging; poking the sidewall stretched fabric on entry suggested generous acoustic absorption had been fitted underneath, and certainly sidewall reflections appeared to be highly controlled.
A couple of minor quibbles; the fronts did seem to be slightly peaky in the mid-high range, and the noise floor was on the high side, and could clearly be heard in quiet moments—in fact, it was louder than the inaudible HVAC system! Absolutely no leakage could be heard from the other auditoria.
Kudos to whoever calibrated the system; they have done a first class job!
The auditorium’s temperature was fairly consistent throughout, although I didn’t quite feel that the fresh air intake rate was as high as I would have liked.
Toilets were clean with some veneered finishes, and down-firing Dyson hand dryers are fitted.
A massive thumbs-up for this premium cinema no doubt aimed at the leafy suburbs nearby.
A planning application for the development is available on the website of the London Borough of Bromley — the relevant documents are “PROPOSED FIRST FLOOR PLAN,” “PROPOSED SECOND FLOOR PLAN-PROJECTOR LEVEL,” and “PROPOSED SECTIONS AA AND BB RETAIL AND CINEMA OPTION.”
The iSense auditorium (Screen 4) is marked “Screen 1” on these plans.
Dimensions as estimated off drawings (scales are conveniently included):
iSense Auditorium: ~16.2m (width) x ~22.5m (depth) x ~8.5m (floor to false ceiling height.) (≈53ft. x74ft. x 28ft.) iSense screen width (as drawn): ~15m (≈49ft.) Main foyer/concessions: ~17m x ~23.5m. (≈59ft. x 77ft.)
According to an article in a local newspaper, the screen in the iSense auditorium measures 15m x 6.2m.
Swindon Interiors' fit-out case study.
Errata: AFAICT the capitalisation for “ISENSE” is either all-capitals or all-lowercase, rather than “iSense.”
A few photos have been uploaded.
Addendum: The Walnuts Shopping Centre multi-storey car park ticket can be validated at the cinema; however, this only covers 3 hours, which for longer features particularly seems insufficient given possibly eating in the foyer and getting to the auditorium before the programme starts.
However, an additional hour is currently £1, so it isn’t too bad.
(N.B. Sunday all-day parking is currently £1.)
The NEC 4K Xenon-lamp projection in the ISENSE auditorium was not far off that achieved by IMAX’s proprietary dual-projection systems (which actually work differently for their 4K laser projection system, with one projector being fed a more detailed image than the other, due to the impossibility of stable sub-pixel alignment at 4K) in terms of being a detailed yet smooth image—but still, the IMAX systems appear to be superior.
The NEC NC3240S is the only Xenon-lamp 4K DCI-compliant projector currently shown on NEC Display Solutions' site—presumably this is the model installed for the ISENSE auditorium.
On sections of fast motion, sometimes odd artifacts could be seen, somewhat reminescent of the early single-chip single-speed “colour wheel” (consumer-grade?) DLP projectors.
Whilst the programming of content and lighting was very good through trailers/adverts onto the main feature, after the feature ended, it took, IIRC, maybe 30 seconds or more for non-sync music playback to abruptly start, and the house lights to be raised.