Just curious on this question.

Back in the day, I think the highest household penetration laserdisc ever achieved was around 2-3%. It was "high end" at the time, and obviously never got to critical mass.

So, the projector market. Does anyone know what the overall percentage is on household penetration for home theater projectors? I would be willing to bet it's under 5%, but that's just a guess.

Also, if the percentage is low, how many projectors are manufacturers selling on some units? It must be pretty low - like say, how many RS-1's have been sold in the US?

I don't know the percentages myself. But I can say the RS1 sold quite a few from a projector standpoint. From a general video standpoint (TV's included)...I would guess a tiny amount.

Below is a graph from pacific Media Associates for all projector sales from June 2004 to June 2005

http://www.pacificmediaassociates.com/Press_releases/press_release_clip_image005.gif

Generally the home theater market for front projection is about 10% of the total market. Where is the growth for home theater front projection heading? Here is another interesting graph for "Instant Front Projection Home Theaters"

http://www.pacificmediaassociates.com/Press_releases/press_release_clip_image009.gif

While the 2007 sales were disappointing, if Pacific Media's predictions are even close this will swamp all other home theater sales. J6P is where the growth is going to come from. He wants to drive down to CostCo or Walmart on Saturday pick up a instant home theater for around $1,000 set it up in the family room and watch Football with the guys on Sunday.

you would imagine that with Costco and some of the QVC type shows selling projectors that percentages must have gone up. On the other hand, I never see them at local TV stores. There is a local TV store called KEn Krane that specializes in HT type equipment where they had a Sharp projector setup along with a Stewart Screen. First they never had it working unless someone asked and that never happened and later they completely ignored it and got rid of it. I dont think they know how to market it. Meantime they have their LCDs and plasmas running from morning to night

Over at our local Frys they have a booth setup on the main floor of the computer section with about 9 business projectors showing movies on small screens. I'm betting that they sell 10 times as many of them as they do selling the 3 projectors they have in the locked demo room in the home theater section of the store. When I asked one of the "sales" people about the three projectors in the demo room he said "Oh you don't want one of those, we have 60inch flat panels that look much better".

Coretronic did 650K units in 2005 (inital target 800K units), 800K in 2006 and this year hopes to gain 30% on the 2007 figure of 700K units which would bring the number of units shipped to 900K.

The company claimed a global marketshare of 19% for 2005, and 16% for 2006, and perhaps Peter or one of his associates has the current figure at hand, so you guestimate how many projectors are shipped worldwide each year, then compare this to the 25 billion USD in 2007 and an expected 28 billion this year (CEA http://www.twice.com/article/CA6524166.html) worth of flatpanels sold in the US alone each year, and conclude that FP is still very much a niche market, probably still smaller than RPTV category used to have in the US.

Overhere in Europe they sell many more FPs these days than they ever sold RPTV, as plenty of LCDs and SVGA DLPs are on offer for a few hundred Euro, and people do buy these to put a big picture on their livingroom wall. I would expect that many more Epson EMP-Ss made it into people's home than the EMP-TW hometheater series.