Epson has been a long-term maker of home, education, commercial, and theatre/event projectors and believes it is time to put a lot of the industry hype in perspective.
According to Paul Haddad, Epson’s senior product manager for the Projector Division, a lot of claims about various brands and performances cannot be substantiated. He was making the statements in a nice, positive way. “If all you can afford for example is single chip DLP, then there are plenty of low-cost projectors from other brands. It is only when you see the difference that you begin to understand why projectors have had such a bad rap in the past.”
Epson is showing off its range of home, education, commercial and venue projectors at Integrate 2016 – and its offerings range from a ultra-short throw to a 25000-lumen venue projector that has been used at Vivid and other light shows.
Integrate runs from 23-25 August at the Sydney Showgrounds at Olympic Park. It’s a trade-only event for the entire AV, Live Production, rental and systems industry. If you are interested in digital signage, projection, sound, light and more head on out. Tickets are free if you register online.
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Haddad showed off Epson’s 3LCD technology, and it was clearly better than DLP. He compared a well-known, similarly specified brand DLP with an Epson. The results were amazing as far as colour gamut, white and blacks are concerned.
He demonstrated the colour gamut – the RGB colours that can be produced and their intensity via a series of 3D models. On the left is the ideal, beside what Epson achieves and then what two popular brands achieve – the aim is to get as close to the ideal on the left.
So on to the projectors on show.
By far the most impressive was the new Pro 25000 lumen, laser, WUXGA, 3LCD projector that shows 1920 x 1200 widescreen and takes native 4K and HD input. The laser light system is virtually maintenance free and has up to 20000 hours of maintenance free operation making it well suited to permanent installations.
Haddad said Pro 25000 was the first with both colour and white brightness of 25000 lumens and had a fully sealed optical engine. It was also smaller than other large venue systems making it ideal for the rental market.
Next was the education interactive projectors that featured ultra-short throw so they could be mounted above whiteboards. The key to these was the software that allowed simultaneous multi-users (a class of students), dual pen support (two models with finger and pen support), SMART Notebook software, PC-Interactivity and PC-free interactivity, and drawing and annotation tools. It also integrates with Epson’s document camera.
The Business Interactive range was similar but the software called MeetingMate took interactivity further and made local and multi-site collaboration easier. These too featured both PC and PC-free interactivity and saving of images.
Epson’s home theatre range launched in early August (iTWire article here) was also on show.
In all, it was illuminating and enabled me to look at the rest of the offerings at the show in a different light.