I believe someone else asked this but I can't find the thread. I hope the Pearl is not closing the iris to darken the black bars as I am building a masking system to cover them up and find them too gray regardless. I want the dynamic iris to be working off the actual movie content. It seems to me it would be fairly easy to detect the black bars and ignore them digitally. With almost half the screen replaced by black bars on an extreme aspect ratio film I hope the Pearl is not dimming the picture too much. Thanks.

Good question and though I am not sure on this, I would suspect that the unit knows when there is information being fed to part of the panel and when there is not, thus making adjustements for that.
Again, I could be wrong though.

It theory DI should not pay attention to dark areas at all - only to bright areas of the image.