Digital Projection Inc held a special press event before the show on the Thursday morning. We dragged ourselves out of bed early to get there. There were five new projectors and a new LED display.
Starting with LED, the company has added a 1.2mm pitch version and said that it has done especially well with 4mm products in House of Worship applications.
DPI President, Mike Levy, then talked about improvements that the company has make in the E-Vision 10K5 projector which now has better red. The projector now has a direct RED system which improves and extends the colour gamut. Levy said that there are two different ways of using red lasers in a laser phosphor system. One way is have a blue laser with a yellow phosphor wheel for the red and green and then adding some red to boost the red output. However, DPI uses a blue laser, a red laser and green comes from the phosphor wheel, which gives better colour than using the yellow wheel.
The Insight 8K is a true high end 8K projector and Levy said that DPI and Delta (which is the parent, these days) have been working together for more than ten years. The chassis was developed in the UK, but the group in Europe worked with China to finalise the design.
The idea of having 8K is not a new one and Levy showed a control room that had previously used 32 FullHD projectors, which could now be replaced by two of the 8K Insight projectors.
In the old days, companies made 8K displays by using 16 FullHD projectors. Image:Meko
The demo was very impressive and uses a 4K DMD that operates at 240Hz, effectively creating four pixels in each 60hz frame. Levy invited press at the event to get as close as they liked to see if the pixel structure and we took him up on that offer. Although our reporter is sensitive to flicker, the temporal dithering was not visible and neither were the pixels. It was impressive. There is no scaling from full 8K content.
The projector can provide 25K Ansi lumens of output from a single phase 208V/30A power supply. There is a lot of light on the DMD and DPI has developed a liquid cooling system. The device uses a laser phosphor engine.
Levy sees a good opportunity for 8K from projection. LEDs are going to be very large, with this resolution, and will also have high cost and power consumption, while LCDs and OLEDs will not be very big and so will not get the most out of the resolution.
DPI thinks projection is a good choice for 8K. Image:Meko
Broadcasters are a natural early customer group as they have been doing much of their testing with four UltraHD projectors. In fact, NHK is the first customer for the DPI projector and have been helpful in the development. Levy also said that he expects some of those that are most interested in home theatre buying the unit. Simulation is also likely to be a good market because the resolution can get close to human visual acuity and data visualisation can also exploit the high resolution. Medical applications are likely to exploit the level of detail and planetariums should be able to cover a whole dome with just two projectors which can simplify blending.
Finally, Levy identified Command and Control, both military and civilian as being able to exploit the level of detail that can be supported. Later, responding to a question, Levy said that there is interest from ‘Sports books’ in casinos which can show 48 events with three projectors.
The company has been working with Astro and Analog Way on content as they are both very involved in 8K image processing and the Astro technology has made its way into the projector.
DPI showed the 8K display with 16 FullHD images. Image:Meko
In response to our question about lenses, Levy told us that its current 4K lenses are good enough as the projector is only ever showing 4K at one time. (We accepted that answer at the time – it was early and he moved onto another question quickly, but later we realised that it’s not a good answer. If the lens blurs the dots at 8K, it could still work well at 4K. The lens does need very good sharpness if the full benefits of 8K are to be realised).
The company also said that it can support 10:10:10 at 240Hz.
The projector will cost $299,999 and will start to ship in August.
The other new projectors were the E-Vision 11000 4K-UHD with 10,500 lumens and the E-Vision 13000-WU with 12,500 lumens. The M-Vision 21000-WU increases brightness to 20,000 lumens and these three all use single chip DLP architectures. The Titan 37000WU, which is intended for rental and staging and is claimed to be the brightest ever 3-Chip DLP laser phosphor projector.
DPI added to its single chip and three chip DLP projectors at the show. Image:Meko
Analyst Comment
Another major projector maker that we talked to at the event, and to whom we mentioned the Insight 8K, doubted that DPI could really drive the DMD at 240Hz, but DPI confirmed at the event that it does do that. (BR)
