About Us

In 1913, Jack Roe listed 'Cinematographic Engineer' on his wedding Certificate.  By the 1920s he was working for the film studios on Wardour Street (“Film Row”) in London - there were about 40 of them at the time.  They had a table tennis league and it was for the polo shirts that Jack first created the now famous 'JACRO' fisheye logo.

When he first started out Maude, his supportive and very patient wife, allowed him to use the family’s kitchen table to do his work. Soon he rented an old hat factory in central London, and the rest, as they say, is history.

From importing shipping containers of cinema carbons to reconditioning film spools - in the 1950s metal was scarce and new film equipment was hard to source and very expensive.  A reconditioned spool from Jack Roe was shipped complete and true, and preferred by most projectionsists to new ones, that arrived in pieces and weren't balanced like the reconditioned ones.

We invented high-density film spacing, the centralised automated phone system, the PLC- based cinema automation, the hybrid cinema PoS system and a variety of different printed splicing tapes. We even created a test film for cutting aperture plate remotely by machine from thousands of miles away.