"We simply cannot finance the conversion right now," said John Fithian, the new president of the theater owners' association.
Seed money from the Kaplan Fund, plus a 3percentt, $12 million mortgage from the Housing and Urban Development Department, would finance the conversion.
Other chains are studying such a move, and studios are working with manufacturers of digital systems to help finance the conversion.
The announcement came as, in a separate deal, the nation's three largest theater chains — Regal, Cinemark and AMC — were negotiating for what Variety reported would be a $1.1 billion line of credit to finance the conversion of their theaters to digital cinema.
He said that he was committed to keeping the Strand running but that he was undecided about how to finance a conversion that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for his theater's four screens.
And despite announcements this year of companies willing to finance the conversion, Mr. Fithian said it remained unlikely in the immediate future, at least until theater owners and the studios can agree on who will pay for the systems and who will control them after they are in place in the nation's theaters.
That dispute was resolved last fall, when a consortium of exhibitors and studios agreed on a plan to finance the conversion of nearly 20,000 theater screens and enlisted JPMorgan Chase & Co. to help with the financing.
They have encouraged farmers to feed cars rather than people and financed the conversion of rainforests in Indonesia, Malaysia and West Africa into oil palm plantations, driving orangutans and many other species to the brink of extinction.
The crop is sunflowers, and sales of sunflower seeds, bagged and sold as birdseed by the New Jersey Audubon Society, have financed the conversion of a 70-acre tract of state-owned land into a grassland habitat.
"You have to view the unsold apartments as a pack of zero coupon bonds that are being sold at a deep discount and have an unsure maturity date," said Charles Hack, president of Parkview Associates, a development and investment firm that has financed the conversion of 30 buildings with 5,000 apartments in New York City over 10 years.
