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4K Projectors in 2017

Michael Jensen

Michael Jensen

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I'm in the market for a 4K projector but it seems like there aren't many options yet. What are people using and are you happy with it?
 
It's more a matter of what your budget is. Tell us your budget and you'll get some answers. Sony's pro-grade 4K SXRD projectors are quite popular in home theater circles and professional ones, but they have noticeable flaws that creep in after some time and the SXRD panels are prone to failure, which Sony has never acknowledged, due to the tech being their one and only solution. Even the laser projectors they have offered thus far use them. There are other choices from Epson, JVC, and some other companies, but they focus more on home theater than professional applications.
 
Originally I had hoped to keep the budget under $5k. But I'm quickly realizing there isn't anything on the market at that price point. So now I'm hoping for under $10k. The projector will replace a 1080 projector in a screening room. I'd like the color accuracy to be good but I have other rooms where critical color correction will take place. I want it to be native 4K. Not one that supports 4K but outputs 1080. There aren't many options out there and whats available is expensive. The 4K projector market is nothing like the 4K TV market.

This Sony keeps coming up: LINK

But there are a ton of used and refurbished ones available which doesn't speak well for the unit.

Thanks for the advice.
 
My Sony VPL-VW600ES is still going strong after 2 years. Biggest negative is that it cannot handle anything greater than 8 bits at UHD/4K, which also means no proper HDR support.

IMO, the UHD/4K projector market is ripe for a legit HDMI 2.1 compliant (DP 1.4 pretty please) 2,000 lumen solution that retails for under $10K. The ultimate question is just how many units one could sell. Until premium UHD/4K content is more widely available, the answer to that is probably not enough to justify the effort.

Cheers - #19
 
Projection blending and mapping has really com down in price, 8k projection mapped is now doable in the $5k region with the smaller laser projectors. I do think the market needs to think "small"/"multi" though, three up to eight 1080p mapped projectors give a great experience but I think a lot of people don't want to rethink the consumer experience even with declining sales.
 
Michael Jensen said:
Originally I had hoped to keep the budget under $5k. But I'm quickly realizing there isn't anything on the market at that price point. So now I'm hoping for under $10k. The projector will replace a 1080 projector in a screening room.
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You can't get a DCI-compliant projector for anywhere near that. There are some used 2K Christies in the $20,000+ range, but you need a ton of space, a lot of cooling, a soundproof booth, and sufficient throw distance in order to get it to work.

There is a point where I think people expect way too high a result for way too little money. If you're doing this professionally, I would find a way to come up with a realistic compromise that works for everybody. For example, there are 65" OLED displays that are plenty big, calibratable to Rec709, and under $5000. Those you could use in a medium-to-small room and satisfy (say) an audience of 7-8 people.
 
BenQ HT8050 4K Home Theater Projector
If you want a 4K DLP home theater projector that BenQ says will deliver "perfect DLP picture quality to rival a commercial digital cinema" (and who wouldn't want that), the BenQ HT8050 is here. And it is the only 4K DLP projector with THX Certification at the moment. Rated at 2,200 lumens, and delivering 8.3 million pixels on screen (3840x2160), it's priced at $7,999.
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Saied_M said:
BenQ HT8050 4K Home Theater Projector
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I like BenQ, they seem to focus getting true color standards into cheaper consumer projectors. But this doesn't even seem to have HDR support. There's only one road down to a 4K projector and that's REC2020, HDR and UHD support.
That's what I'm waiting for before replacing my 1080p projector.
 
Christoffer Glans said:
I like BenQ, they seem to focus getting true color standards into cheaper consumer projectors. But this doesn't even seem to have HDR support. There's only one road down to a 4K projector and that's REC2020, HDR and UHD support. That's what I'm waiting for before replacing my 1080p projector.
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Man, HDR is hard to achieve even when you spend ten times this amount of money.
 
The projection industry. I proposed mounting laser projectors together to stick together a 4k image around 10-13 years ago.

There were simply heaps of small micro projector companies years ago. Any of these could probably do what you want, if they wanted to do something, and cheaper than $5k. I even found a company doing a 16k part I was aiming to use as pocket projection table projector (I used to know top people in microprocessing engineering who could make a processing engine for it). What did all these companies achieve by doing less than they could and letting the big boys dictate stuff and price, not much.

An excellent target for crowd funding project.
 
I think one of the computer display companies has a wide angle 4k projector they are proposing for this year. I can't remember the name, but it might have been laser, as it gives surround vision across the room around the primary monitor. Interested myself. If only the company could be enticed to support professional standards etc.....by some one....
 
Wayne Morellini said:
The projection industry. I proposed mounting laser projectors together to stick together a 4k image around 10-13 years ago. There were simply heaps of small micro projector companies years ago. Any of these could probably do what you want, if they wanted to do something, and cheaper than $5k.
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The problem boils down to accurate gray scale, freedom from clipping, color fidelity, even light output, and all that stuff. There's more to it than just strapping a laser to an imaging device and blasting it through a lens; the electronics will kill you.

Have you seen the racks and racks of gear necessary to illuminate and cool a Christie 4KLH Laser Projector? These things are big, loud, and very expensive:

4KLH-main1.png


https://www.christiedigital.com/en-...-Mirage-4KLH-3DLP-RGB-Digital-Laser-Projector

I think you need this when you need to illuminate a 50-60-70' screen. The problem is when people need only (say) a 15' screen, there's nothing out there that can satisfy all the requirements for DCI-compliant cinema, not for laser. If you can live with DLP (not laser), Barco's DP4K-P can do it for about $32K (plus installation, cooling, screen, and the associated electronics):

https://www.barco.com/en/Products/P...tors/4K-digital-postproduction-projector.aspx

As I always say about this time every year, no doubt we'll see more 4K projection options at NAB in April. Whether they can do HDR is a good question, but doing all that at low cost is extremely challenging.
 
Marc, I'll take it that you don't disbelieve the smaller Red prototypes and Sony projectors exist, because they are smaller. Then why attack me with this ridiculous stuff. High power large coverage technology can be prone to a lot of issues.

For a grading room its not the same.

Now, why do you think DLP and laser are separate? You can use a laser light source on dlp. If you are taking about a free form laser device, I'm not. I personally have come up with over 100 laser display scanning mechanisms until I came up with the probable perfect solution. However, apart from line mirror array scanning, Sony's ribbon and dlp, it should be difficult with today's technology for precision wide field high powered free form scan (and 2 axis). However, there are simple ways to get pixel level precision, and even consumer DAC technology works adequately on the electronic side. If you limit your expectation to 60-120-200 inches (hope you recognise the sizes) and grading level luminance it would he easier. Maybe HDR would be doable. So, maybe offer support or let the thread move onto other options. Laser is not the only light source option.
 
Here is some useful information. Sony HDR projector test. Note, that the DCI coverage is probably less than the thin LG OLED, and the HDR is not the greatest.

http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/vw550es-201702194430.htm

Reality check, find the cheapest sd projector that can be made to meet spec and realise it would cost little more to make a 4k or 8k version, except stratification strategies do not want less product. Once quality is reached, resolution scales rather well at the same pixel size. I'm wondering if a line scanner is pretty good. I saw a laser line array ten years ago at least 2400 pixels up to 19200 lasers, commodity market part. QLED are going be great for the small projector market.
 
I think consumer projectors are on their last leg and we won't see much innovation coming out of them, just as we saw with rear-projection which is now effectively dead forever. For the same price as a good projector you can get a really really good HDR 85" 4k display that has infinitely better contrast in daylight and is big 'enough' for most business applications. Giant flat panels also offer multi-touch for board rooms as a digital white-board replacement. Projectors are already silly for most business applications, just buy a $1,200 75" Vizio-E and your powerpoints will look way better than a $2,000 projector. The only place projectors will hold onto their advantage is in the 100"+ scale and that's a really really small home market which means no economy of scale anymore to mass produce them. I'm sure though that people would happily purchase 100"+ LCDs if they came down in price like 80" sets have in recent years. For $5k you can get an incredible 85" HDR and you don't have to solve complicated cabling problems, you don't have to deal with ambient light leakage for HDR, you don't have black out a whole room in your house and you can actually get a broader color gamut than anything except for laser projection--all without any DLP style motion artifacts.
 
They became cash cows to get money put of people. You build something that can be made cheaper than a TV and charge a lot more, and people pay for it like the company is the one doing them a favour. The unrealistic price is what is killing it, and with that price luxury marketing they are reducing volume. But rear projection is still OK, just look at laser vue (which was scheduled to come out in a $1600 product but went to $7k with the laser vue manufacturer at start of the GFC, killing it. I mean its like these companies know when I am planning to buy something and throw spanners in the works each time :001_smile:
 
Wayne Morellini said:
Marc, I'll take it that you don't disbelieve the smaller Red prototypes and Sony projectors exist, because they are smaller. Then why attack me with this ridiculous stuff.
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None of those were DCI-compliant. Anybody can make a projector and shine a picture against a wall -- I saw a $695 Epson projector at Fry's the other day. You could try using that. (But it ain't a laser projector, and it ain't accurate.)

If it can't be calibrated, I don't see the point. It's just an A/V projector you'd use in an economics class for PowerPoint demonstrations. If you want a picture you can really believe, this won't hack it.

The Red Laser projectors turned into vaporware as far as I know. I think the reality is that they're really, really complicated and hard to make. If they worked well and were simple to make, I think we would've seen them 4 or 5 years ago. The DCI spec is very specific and not that easy to reproduce.

A lot of this stuff is pie-in-the-sky speculation that isn't real yet. I only believe it when they demo it at NAB or SMPTE and they're taking orders and have a shipping date.
 
No, it's imaginary stuff about what is real being unreal.

Now, if I'm following Michael's conversation alright, he started asking about a projector that didn't need to be accurate like a dci is.

Now as far as the P3 spec at lower power for smaller screen sizes, it is likely it will be much more accurate. It is not really magical, it is science and the science is beyond p3. Aces even a laser would struggle (I understand they are at least 10% under the visual realm in 3 primary configuration, maybe because our eyes would vary on response over frequency. However, reading about Kodaks (cough did this become Red's) cinema laser project effort is an interesting read.
 
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