dicey
06-20-07, 10:48 PM
First of all, let me start by saying that this was my first Infocomm and I was trying to see as much as I could before time ran out on me, so I probably missed a few things along the way and got a few of the details mixed up as well. And I'm sorry I don't have any photos to post. Most of the ones I took either didn't turn out so good or were of stuff everybody's already seen before. Anyway, on to the good stuff!
Nippura Blue Ocean had a nice demo of their high-end Blue Ocean Screen (BOS) RP-only screen in the full ambient light of the show floor and it still looked pretty darn good. I just wish they would have had a darkroom demo. They also were showing their new Clarex screens in both a RP and FP designs, which are both much thinner than the standard BOS. The RP was noticably inferior to the BOS but it had a matte finish and didn't pick up any reflections. The FP was nice and is designed to compete with the Visage and Supernova screens. It did hotspot a little, but I've seen much worse and it seemed to have only a very moderate brightness shift. A good showing from Blue Ocean.
Calibre had a new scaler, the PremierViewProHD-AV, which has HDMI1.3 and HS-SDI, 10 bit processing, SO Realta scaler, supports resolutions up to 2K, etc.
Lumagen's new scaler, the RadianceXD, is ISF certified, has 2.35 anamorphic stretch, parametric grayscale and gamma calibration, 4 user memories and 8 resolution submemories, CUE and ICP filtering, etc.
PixelMagic-Crystalio had 3 scalers, can't remember their names, flagship had HD-SDI, BNCs, and a 200G HDD ($4500), middle one looses the HD-SDI and HDD ($3500) and their new entry level one looses the BNCs and has fewer inputs ($3000).
Sony had a new 23" 1200x1920 LCD reference monitor, the BVM-L230 ($25,000 :eek: ) designed mainly for film post production. It uses an LED backlight but was not overly bright and had some of the most dead accurate colors I have ever seen. But to me the most impressive thing about it was that it had no visable brightness shift in any direction! I wonder how much the eventual 32 incher's gonna cost?!
Samsung had a LED LCD reference monitor as well. Theirs was 30" and had incredibly vivid colors without oversaturation. Can't wait to see how their 81-series consumer models are going to look, although they will use a totally different LED backlight design.
Optoma had their 1080p HD80 ($3000) on display in a dark theater with a Panamorph lens and sled. It uses the Gennum VPX scaler and has a built-in menu option for a 2.35 stretch mode and a 12V trigger for the sled! I believe this is the first PJ to offer this option for under $10,000 and it looked excellent. This is hands down the best value PJ in he $3-5K range.
Projectiondesign had their new Cineo30 1080p 1-chip DLP (6500 lumens) and F80 1080p 3-chip DLP (8000 lumens) on active display. Both looked great but when I squeezed a rep for the price and date for the F80, all he would say was "before the end of Q1" and "over $30K and under $60K." Some help he was. :rolleyes:
Digital Projection Int. had a really nice booth that was mainly showing off some new edge-blending software they had developed since all of their PJs were displayed in 2's and 3's using mainly panning still images. It sure looked pretty, though! And I couldn't see any seams in any of the images, no matter how hard I looked. Pretty impressive. I talked to one of the reps and he said they didn't have any plans to upgrade the 1080-250 into a 1080-300 like some of us thought they would. Oh, and their new ColorMax calibration software looks surprisingly easy to use. Just punch in the primary and secondary color points and BAM! - instant calibration! :cool: I wish my TV had that!
JVC had their new 4K projector prototype inside of a small theater that was back-to-back with another small theater that was showing the RS1 with a Panamorph. The 4K had a 15 min. guided demo which ran every half hour or so. All the demo material was in 4K and it started off with a clip from a CG flight simulator and the spokeswoman mentiond that the FAA has only authorized the use of LCOS projectors for use in their simulators. Then there were a bunch of static and panning still images which looked very nice but were nothing to get too excited about. Next was a live shot from a 4K studio-type camera which they had set up just outside of the theater. They had built this little kitchen with a live model sitting at a table and they had all of their different HD cameras that they make lined up in a row in front of the kitchen, allowing whoever wanted to, to walk up and play with any of the cameras (execpt the 4K one, of course) and get a feel for how they all worked. Pretty cool. Anyway, thats were the live shot came from. Last, were some clips shot with the same 4K camera but recorded in Yokohama, Japan. All of the shots were of bright outdoor day scenes and had either a slow pan or were static. They all looked gorgeous but were hardly pushing the limits of the projector. And that was it. I wish there would have been some clips of a Hollywood movie or some nightshots from that 4K camera but no such luck. The projector definitely looked great, I just wish they would have shown what it was truly capable of. But to be fair, it was still a prototype and I was impressed, just not blown away.
Barco's booth was my favorite. It was beautifully designed and layed out and they have some of the coolest looking (and best performing) projos on the market. They had the XLM HD30 on static display and it just looked scary! That thing is the size of a hearst! OK, maybe it's not that big, but its huge! They had their new CLM HD8 1080p 1-chip DLP ($30,000) on active display and I think it is the best 'singlechipper available. It can use either 2x300W or 4x300W UHPs to get up to 8000 lumens and has a standard 1200:1 CR or a 2000:1 CR using an apature plate, which reduces the lumens by 25%. They also demo'd their new scalable NX-4 LED panels for LV displays using a roughly 20'x30' wall of them and it looked amazing! Super bright with vivid colors and excellect blacks, it pretty much stopped whoever happened to be walking by in their tracks whenever the demo would start! A tip o' the hat to Barco for a great show!
OK. Now the moment you've all been waiting for....! The Large Venue Display Gallery! At least it was what I was most looking foward to! All of the rooms had the same 27'x15' screens. I started with the Barco room - a FLM HD18 was their weapon of choice (would have loved for it to have been the HD30 :D ) - very nice, amazing color and detail and a clip of a nighttime flyover of the Vegas Strip almost made me feel like I was flying! :D Very cool! But then the demo material became a bunch of still images and weird CG videos :o .......BORING!!! So I tried the next room which had a Christie Roadie HD+30K (another monster!) but it was showing the same lame clips. :confused: So I tried Room #3 which had a DPI Lightning 40-1080p and a Titan 1080p-600...... SAME LAME CLIPS!!!! :( I couldn't believe it! Here were all of these incredible projectors showing the most visual unintersting demo material! :mad: I understand they wanted to keep the demos equal but COME ON!! Just about to give up hope, I moped into the Sony room where they were demoing their SRX-S110 4K battleship and raised my eyes up to the screen expecting to see more of the same. But what I saw instead completely blew my mind! This was easily THE MOST AMAZING PICTURE QUALITY I HAVE EVER SEEN!!!!! The guys running the Sony demo must have felt the same way I did about the standard demo material and had opted to use some of their own 2K and 4K clips. One of the most visually impressive of these was a 4K trailer for an IMAX movie called Mystic India. Now I've seen my fair share of IMAX films, but this was incredible! While it didn't have the size and scope of IMAX, the clarity of the image was something I have never seen before. For the first time ever, I literally felt like I could reach in and touch the objects I was seeing on the screen! Simply breathtaking! But the one clip that truely made me shake my head in disbelief was a 4K clip from the Sound of Music. Yep, you read that right, THE SOUND OF MUSIC!!! The clip was from the scene were Julie Andrews teaches the children the 'Doe, A Dear' song in the Bavarian countyside. Now here is movie that must be like 50 years old and during the entire time that I'm watching it, I literally felt like, that at any given monent I could walk into the picture and start dancing around with Julie and the kids!! It was that clear. And honestly, if I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't have believed that such transparency was possible. My hat is off to Sony and the "demoboys" for showing me and everyone else who saw it just what is truly possible when the sky's the limit! I only wish that I could have seen these clips on the other projectors in the other rooms because I know that they would have looked amazing as well. Infocomm, PLEASE PROVIDE SOME REAL DEMO MATERIAL NEXT TIME!!!
I'd also like to thank Dizzman for scoreing me a free pass to the show. I owe you one, bro.
Nippura Blue Ocean had a nice demo of their high-end Blue Ocean Screen (BOS) RP-only screen in the full ambient light of the show floor and it still looked pretty darn good. I just wish they would have had a darkroom demo. They also were showing their new Clarex screens in both a RP and FP designs, which are both much thinner than the standard BOS. The RP was noticably inferior to the BOS but it had a matte finish and didn't pick up any reflections. The FP was nice and is designed to compete with the Visage and Supernova screens. It did hotspot a little, but I've seen much worse and it seemed to have only a very moderate brightness shift. A good showing from Blue Ocean.
Calibre had a new scaler, the PremierViewProHD-AV, which has HDMI1.3 and HS-SDI, 10 bit processing, SO Realta scaler, supports resolutions up to 2K, etc.
Lumagen's new scaler, the RadianceXD, is ISF certified, has 2.35 anamorphic stretch, parametric grayscale and gamma calibration, 4 user memories and 8 resolution submemories, CUE and ICP filtering, etc.
PixelMagic-Crystalio had 3 scalers, can't remember their names, flagship had HD-SDI, BNCs, and a 200G HDD ($4500), middle one looses the HD-SDI and HDD ($3500) and their new entry level one looses the BNCs and has fewer inputs ($3000).
Sony had a new 23" 1200x1920 LCD reference monitor, the BVM-L230 ($25,000 :eek: ) designed mainly for film post production. It uses an LED backlight but was not overly bright and had some of the most dead accurate colors I have ever seen. But to me the most impressive thing about it was that it had no visable brightness shift in any direction! I wonder how much the eventual 32 incher's gonna cost?!
Samsung had a LED LCD reference monitor as well. Theirs was 30" and had incredibly vivid colors without oversaturation. Can't wait to see how their 81-series consumer models are going to look, although they will use a totally different LED backlight design.
Optoma had their 1080p HD80 ($3000) on display in a dark theater with a Panamorph lens and sled. It uses the Gennum VPX scaler and has a built-in menu option for a 2.35 stretch mode and a 12V trigger for the sled! I believe this is the first PJ to offer this option for under $10,000 and it looked excellent. This is hands down the best value PJ in he $3-5K range.
Projectiondesign had their new Cineo30 1080p 1-chip DLP (6500 lumens) and F80 1080p 3-chip DLP (8000 lumens) on active display. Both looked great but when I squeezed a rep for the price and date for the F80, all he would say was "before the end of Q1" and "over $30K and under $60K." Some help he was. :rolleyes:
Digital Projection Int. had a really nice booth that was mainly showing off some new edge-blending software they had developed since all of their PJs were displayed in 2's and 3's using mainly panning still images. It sure looked pretty, though! And I couldn't see any seams in any of the images, no matter how hard I looked. Pretty impressive. I talked to one of the reps and he said they didn't have any plans to upgrade the 1080-250 into a 1080-300 like some of us thought they would. Oh, and their new ColorMax calibration software looks surprisingly easy to use. Just punch in the primary and secondary color points and BAM! - instant calibration! :cool: I wish my TV had that!
JVC had their new 4K projector prototype inside of a small theater that was back-to-back with another small theater that was showing the RS1 with a Panamorph. The 4K had a 15 min. guided demo which ran every half hour or so. All the demo material was in 4K and it started off with a clip from a CG flight simulator and the spokeswoman mentiond that the FAA has only authorized the use of LCOS projectors for use in their simulators. Then there were a bunch of static and panning still images which looked very nice but were nothing to get too excited about. Next was a live shot from a 4K studio-type camera which they had set up just outside of the theater. They had built this little kitchen with a live model sitting at a table and they had all of their different HD cameras that they make lined up in a row in front of the kitchen, allowing whoever wanted to, to walk up and play with any of the cameras (execpt the 4K one, of course) and get a feel for how they all worked. Pretty cool. Anyway, thats were the live shot came from. Last, were some clips shot with the same 4K camera but recorded in Yokohama, Japan. All of the shots were of bright outdoor day scenes and had either a slow pan or were static. They all looked gorgeous but were hardly pushing the limits of the projector. And that was it. I wish there would have been some clips of a Hollywood movie or some nightshots from that 4K camera but no such luck. The projector definitely looked great, I just wish they would have shown what it was truly capable of. But to be fair, it was still a prototype and I was impressed, just not blown away.
Barco's booth was my favorite. It was beautifully designed and layed out and they have some of the coolest looking (and best performing) projos on the market. They had the XLM HD30 on static display and it just looked scary! That thing is the size of a hearst! OK, maybe it's not that big, but its huge! They had their new CLM HD8 1080p 1-chip DLP ($30,000) on active display and I think it is the best 'singlechipper available. It can use either 2x300W or 4x300W UHPs to get up to 8000 lumens and has a standard 1200:1 CR or a 2000:1 CR using an apature plate, which reduces the lumens by 25%. They also demo'd their new scalable NX-4 LED panels for LV displays using a roughly 20'x30' wall of them and it looked amazing! Super bright with vivid colors and excellect blacks, it pretty much stopped whoever happened to be walking by in their tracks whenever the demo would start! A tip o' the hat to Barco for a great show!
OK. Now the moment you've all been waiting for....! The Large Venue Display Gallery! At least it was what I was most looking foward to! All of the rooms had the same 27'x15' screens. I started with the Barco room - a FLM HD18 was their weapon of choice (would have loved for it to have been the HD30 :D ) - very nice, amazing color and detail and a clip of a nighttime flyover of the Vegas Strip almost made me feel like I was flying! :D Very cool! But then the demo material became a bunch of still images and weird CG videos :o .......BORING!!! So I tried the next room which had a Christie Roadie HD+30K (another monster!) but it was showing the same lame clips. :confused: So I tried Room #3 which had a DPI Lightning 40-1080p and a Titan 1080p-600...... SAME LAME CLIPS!!!! :( I couldn't believe it! Here were all of these incredible projectors showing the most visual unintersting demo material! :mad: I understand they wanted to keep the demos equal but COME ON!! Just about to give up hope, I moped into the Sony room where they were demoing their SRX-S110 4K battleship and raised my eyes up to the screen expecting to see more of the same. But what I saw instead completely blew my mind! This was easily THE MOST AMAZING PICTURE QUALITY I HAVE EVER SEEN!!!!! The guys running the Sony demo must have felt the same way I did about the standard demo material and had opted to use some of their own 2K and 4K clips. One of the most visually impressive of these was a 4K trailer for an IMAX movie called Mystic India. Now I've seen my fair share of IMAX films, but this was incredible! While it didn't have the size and scope of IMAX, the clarity of the image was something I have never seen before. For the first time ever, I literally felt like I could reach in and touch the objects I was seeing on the screen! Simply breathtaking! But the one clip that truely made me shake my head in disbelief was a 4K clip from the Sound of Music. Yep, you read that right, THE SOUND OF MUSIC!!! The clip was from the scene were Julie Andrews teaches the children the 'Doe, A Dear' song in the Bavarian countyside. Now here is movie that must be like 50 years old and during the entire time that I'm watching it, I literally felt like, that at any given monent I could walk into the picture and start dancing around with Julie and the kids!! It was that clear. And honestly, if I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't have believed that such transparency was possible. My hat is off to Sony and the "demoboys" for showing me and everyone else who saw it just what is truly possible when the sky's the limit! I only wish that I could have seen these clips on the other projectors in the other rooms because I know that they would have looked amazing as well. Infocomm, PLEASE PROVIDE SOME REAL DEMO MATERIAL NEXT TIME!!!
I'd also like to thank Dizzman for scoreing me a free pass to the show. I owe you one, bro.