Although Edison was initially uninterested in projecting his films, many saw it as the obvious next step. Inspired by Edison's Kinetoscope, which arrived in Paris in late 1894, Auguste and Louis Lumière developed a single device that could act as both camera and projector. They called it the Cinématographe and showed a working version in March of 1895. The round perforations, one pair per frame, were engaged by pins that advanced the film a frame at a time, a mechanism inspired by the sewing machine. (Sewing machines advance cloth intermittently, holding it still while the stitch is made, then pulling it forward for the next stitch.) But by 1897, Edison's format with four rectangular perfs for each frame had become standard and the Lumières shifted to that format

Their first presentation to a paying audience was on December 28, 1895, two months after the Skladanowsky's first paid show and seven months after the Lathams presented to a paying audience. But the Skladanowskys projector was complex and unconventional and the Latham projector was not very effective.