On October 24th, Hisense USA held an event in New York at the Harman Store to introduce its 100″ 4K Ultra HD Smart Laser TV. A similar but not identical prototype unit had been shown before at IFA. The unit shown at IFA was UHD with two laser colors, blue and red, to enhance the system colorimetry. The product introduced in New York was UHD, using a 0.66” DLP imager and pixel shift, but had the conventional blue laser and yellow phosphor light source. According to Hisense, this arrangement produces Rec. 709 colorimetry. A Hisense rep told me the system with both blue and red lasers that will produce a wider color gamut is still on the roadmap for the future.
Hisense Laser TV in a living room setting. The system includes the projector, the screen and the wireless sub-woofer, visible in the lower left. (Credit: M. Brennesholtz)
The product as introduced has 3,000 Lumens output and a claimed light source lifetime of 20,000 hours. It is an ultra-short throw system and comes with a companion 100” 16:9 off-axis, contrast enhancing screen from Screen Innovations. The screen uses Screen Innovations Short Throw (ST) material which has a gain of 0.6 and is said to provide up to a 700% increase in contrast in the presence of ambient light. Both horizontal and vertical viewing angles of this screen are good. The horizontal viewing angle is nearly 180° and the vertical viewing angle is good enough so someone could watch the TV while lying on the floor.
Video input to the system is via two HDMI 2.0a connectors. In addition, the system was a smart TV and could show streaming content from a Wi-Fi Internet connection. The built-in NTSC/ATSC/Clear QAM TV tuner offers access to over-the-air content.
The 2.1 sound system for the laser TV was provided by Harman International. The five speakers in the system included left and right woofers and tweeters built into the body of the laser projector and an external, wirelessly connected 6.5″ sub-woofer. Total audio power was 110W.
Five of the laser TVs were shown at the introduction event, one in a living room environment, as shown in the image above, one in a bedroom environment and one in what might have been a high-tech man-cave. The fourth was used to display the images for the Hisense introductory talk. All of these demos except the man-cave were in the relatively bright store environment. The man-cave unit was shown in a darkened area with light from high-tech looking neon lighting. All these units were shown using the Screen Innovations 100” screen. This ambient light rejecting, front projection screen helped with the ambient light but I would still say the color and contrast on these units was mediocre, considering the price of the system. The Hisense goal for showing the projector in these different environments was to demonstrate how the projector could be installed in any room in the house, not just a dedicated home theater or TV room.
“Lucy” being shown by the Hisense 100″ 4K Ultra HD Smart Laser TV on a 136” home theater screen in a darkened, quiet area. (Credit: M. Brennesholtz)
The fifth unit was shown in a darkened home theater room on a 136” 21:9 portion of a home theater screen. Not surprisingly, in the dark room with black walls, the color and contrast of the projector looked much better. The sound was produced by the Harman system in the TV and it sounded pretty good to me. My ears are getting old and I should not be taken as the final judge of sound quality.
The Hisense 100″ 4K Ultra HD Smart Laser TV has a MSRP of $9999 and will be shipping in November. –Matthew Brennesholtz
Analyst Comment
Personally, I think this is a rather high price to pay for a TV that is not High Dynamic Range and not Wide Color Gamut. If you really want a 100” image and have limited concern about image quality but a high concern about ease of installation, perhaps this is for you. If you are concerned about image and sound quality more than size, you can get a good 75” HDR, UHD, WCG LCD with a 5.1 audio system for significantly less than the $10K price of this projector. MB
