CEDIA 2007 - Day 2: 1080p Projector Roundup, High Def Players & Ferrari Sound
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on September 7, 2007 3:21 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Epson PowerLite Pro Cinema 1080 UB
Panasonic wasn't the only manufacturer with a new 3-chip LCD at CEDIA, Epson was hot on its heels with the PowerLite Pro Cinema 1080 UB. With a price at under $5000, the Epson actually threw a pretty impressive picture - in our informal comparison easily comparable to the Panasonic in most areas.
The biggest drawback to the Epson was poor detail in dark areas of the screen, which is partially the fault of the LCD technology Epson is using. The black levels themselves were good but picking out any detail in the blacks was difficult, seemingly moreso than on the Panasonic PT-AE2000U but keep in mind that the two projectors were viewed under very different circumstances.
Epson demonstrated the projector in a 2.35:1 setup, but the projector doesn't support the necessary vertical stretch mode so an external Silicon Optix scaler was used:
Depending on the eventual street price, the Epson could prove to be good competition for the Panasonic.
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zemane - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
I don't know much about projectors but, is it too difficult to manufacture a native 2.35:1 projector? This way only 16:9 and 4:3 movies would have black bars on each side. Imagine, a true 2538x1080 image... :-)Fluppeteer - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Well, there are 4K projectors, if you've got the input and the money. (Or you can just run two SXGA projectors on their sides, overlapping.)This is the first I've heard of the anamorphic business. I'm confused: given that there's no more data available to add pixels, why digitally scale up (removing some high frequency information in the process, unless there's something exceptionally clever going on) to fill the 1080 pixels of the image, then stick an additional anamorphic (expensive and complicated, and probably not quite as high quality as a "normal" lens) lens in front of the existing optical elements? What does this gain you that sticking a bog standard wide angle lens on the front of the projector (and putting a couple of bits of cardboard over the borders if your projector has a poor black point) doesn't?
It just sounds like a really complicated and expensive way of making the image worse. Am I missing something?
Guuts - Friday, September 7, 2007 - link
The last (bottom-most) picture on Page 7 appears to be upside down.BigToque - Friday, September 7, 2007 - link
The projector could also be upside down and attached to a ceiling mount.