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
SIM2 C3X1080
SIM2 is a smaller manufacturer of very high end projectors and it introduced its most affordable 3-chip DLP 1080p projector: the C3X1080. How affordable can a SIM2 get? $30,000 in this case.
The C3X1080 uses TI's new DarkChip 4 DLP panels and is available with three lenses for various throw distances. Anamorphic lens attachments are optional extras. The $30,000 MSRP includes one of the standard lenses but not the anamorphic lens.
DarkChip 4
All aspects of the C3X1080 are configurable, including fully adjustable primary and secondary colors.
The image thrown by the C3X1080 was nothing short of breathtaking on the 10' wide 2.35:1 screen. The content was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on Blu-ray and put all of the other projectors we had seen up to this point to shame. The JVC RS2 and Sony's VW200 were no longer impressive, the C3X1080 was all there was.
Granted you could easily buy two VW200s or possibly up to four RS2s for the price of one C3X1080, so it's mostly a pipe dream but a beautiful one at that.
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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.