New Casio projectors: LED/Laser, 720p, compact - Page 2

I've been expecting a HT LED light-sourced projector for the last 1.5 years so I wasn't too surprised to see something in the correct lumens range.

What surprised me was that it's only 720P.

Why develop new technology at the old resolution?
If it was 1080P I'd buy one, but know that if I bought a 720 Projector I'd kick myself in a year and want 1080P

-Brian

PS though if it's super quiet it might be OK to move it upstairs into a bedroom where 720P is enough when the 1080P is released LOL

Because it's a data projector, no need for 1080p. Anyway only the light source is revolutionary, they could install any DLP chip they want (and why not LCD), including 1920x1080 if they want to make a HT projector.

Good news, not that I want to buy this, but I rather expect the « old » bulb technology getting cheaper for my next purchase

"It uses same old ~200 watts..."

Add up the power of all your household lights running and it won't seem so bad.

Now that I think about it, pj's power usage is probably more than canceled by all the lights we turn off to watch a movie.

When did 720p become an old format ? Last I checked it is currently what the major networks are broadcasting, and most PS3 games.

For HT freaks that watch mostly sports and gaming, 720p is the perfect resolution to match the content, where 1808p equipment will actually yield a worse on screen image.

I have no idea the timeframe, but considering the $$$millions invested by the networks, it may be years before they go 1080p.

So how bad will movies look on this pj? My parents have steered clear of pjs because they like to have the tv on for many hours a day and that isn't practical with expensive bulbs, but with this unit, theres no worries and it can be turned off and on without having to worry about using up bulb hours. The price seems really nice considerig you won't have to worry about bulb dimming and replacement

I chatted to one of their reps on the floor. We talked about how hot this would be if it would work for the home theater market. He asked me how big was that market? I didn't know but asked him what he thought was a "make a proper profit" market for one of their business projectors. He said 200,000 units. Anyone know how big our market is? 200,000 for one model seems like a gigantic stretch. (P.S. I have no idea if this guy really knew what he was talking about.)

My untrained observation was that the projector showing the movies was too bright and had marginal contrast. Would need some good engineering to get to our requirements. Incredibly exciting though!

Jack

1080p is not all that. If you need to sit 5 feet from your screen or you have razor sharp vision and a huge Bluray collection you could benefit but 720p serves the HT community well and will continue to do so. Some home theaters are still getting by with 480p.

According to Pete Putnam on his visit to Epson, the market is 5.8 million with 600k HT pjs. Rereading the article, I am not sure if that is the overall market or just Epson's sales numbers.

If the market is 600K for HT projectors then it seems like Casio should tweak this thing for contrast and go for it. I love the fact that my Samsung LED RPTV will never need a new bulb and the ISF cal. I paid for will last for the duration. That's why I bought it.

Jack

My thoughts precisely.

I prefer 1080p because it can make a better computer display. But I have sworn I'll never buy another expensive bulb for my Sharp DLP so it is sort of a race against time on the current bulb (my 4th) and this 720p appears to be a good candidate.

- Tom

How beautiful would it be to have a 3000 lumen D6500K, 1080p projector (assuming proper gray scale, contrast, signal processing, etc. etc.)? It would allow the use of a pretty darned big and relatively inexpensive unity gain screen viewable from very wide angles, and we don't have to plan on dimming in our set-up, or having a moving fL target, or spending $400 a year on bulbs, while being mad half the time because it is too dim. I assume I'm going to make my new pj last until then. That will be fantastic.

I attended a Joe Kane session at Da-Lite's booth that was very interesting. He made the statement that unless something new is done LEDs will not have the full color spectrum that a bulb does. He said that LED colors would normally lack saturation because of this limit. I wonder what he would say about this mixing of LED, laser, and phosphor on the Casio.

Jack

I'm not sure how he came up with that. With the currently available LED units the problem seems to be oversaturation, not under. The Vivitek LED for instance can do a red in Native mode that is extremely red. Much more saturated than Joe would want. It can also do a much less saturated red in REC.709 mode. Maybe there is more to what he meant, like not having enough light output to fight having other lights on in the room or something like that.

--Darin

Joe Kane was an "expert" back in the days of NTSC laserdisc and CRT technology, but he's not an industry expert anymore, though he's certainly a great guy doing a lot to advance high quality video reproduction.

I may have my term, spectrum, wrong. But he did say that you could not get enough saturation. Someone asked if perhaps the PJ mfgs adjusted the colors via electronics to get the saturation wouldn't that work. He slightly evaded answering that question with a tone that suggested that he didn't know what the result would be and if it would be accurate.

Jack

What are you basing your opinion on?

Does anyone pre-order Casio green slim projector at Casio US site ?
A130 model only sells at $799 ! (amazing cheap)

I can't wait to see inside of this projector .
It's really a cool stuff among projector products.

Email from Casio America says March availability for XJ-A130.

Pre-order is up here:

http://my.casio.com/index.cfm?fuseac...m%20Projectors

JK advocated for a 720p red-laser disc-based HD format, because he couldn't see how 1080p resolution would become available to the consumer with the advent of digital chip-based projectors and flat-panel displays. I was flamed royally on this forum for suggesting, at the time, that Joe Kane lacked "vision" for pushing for a 720p red-laser standard rather than pushing for a full 1080p disc-based solution. His penchant for 720p stemmed from his love affair with CRT and that fact that it was less costly to develop CRT display technology that could make the most of 720, but much less practical/cost-effective to deliver true 1080p resolution from CRT designs.

If you think about it, 1080p being a standard has actually hurt more than it has helped.

Not to say that having displays with lower res is a terrible thing, but for some technologies pixel count should be so high right now, that they should be irrelevant. (so many of them you can't possibly see them, at any distance, thinking more of PC monitors here, since for projection we'd need better optics that turn out to be more expensive than the chips themselves)

But, 1080p seems to have stopped development of higher resolution displays on it's tracks. I guess at least prices have come down.

Now, i'm not saying displays haven't improved a lot in other areas that needed more improvement anyway. I just don't think they're mutually exclusive, pixel count should be off the charts by now in some displays technologies with out adding too much to the price.

For projection chips i can see the optics being a challenge. But is there really a reason chips themselves couldn't be much higher res than they are if they're bound to Moore's law?
It sure would be nice to see pixel count keep going up like it used to be before they reached 1080p.

I mean, remember how many models of 540p projectors Panasonic had before having a 720p one? and then a 1080p one?
We've been stuck at 1080p longer than anything else. (again, this is not to take away anything from other areas that have improved tremendously, but like i said, they're not mutually exclusive)

I try to be open minded. But your post seems to express an unsupportable opinion... that somehow "1080" resolution is a bad thing because... let me see if I got this... we now have 1080 instead of something less like 720?

???

The criticism being that we should actually have higher than 1080 and since we don't, therefore we should have gotten something less instead?

???

BTW, did you see the ultra-high-res 80+ inch 4K HD display at CES?

What i meant was. Before we reached what the CE marketers refer to as "the holy grail" (1080p) we had a pretty smooth uphill pixel count increase over the years.
But when we got to 1080p it seems to have taken longer than ever for a pixel increase that should come naturally, in spite of other advancements (or lack of) in PQ.


Yeah, those 4k displays are nice, (and they're also either prototypes or really expensive) but my point is. If you compare how long it took to get form 540p, to 1080p. We should have higher res displays by now, regardless of the need for better optics to take full advantage of this.

You and I can debate the technical/political issues behind the progress of higher-resolution displays coming to market, but to suggest that somehow having attained 1080p is the reason why we're not getting 4K has no basis.

BTW, we lived with 480i NTSC resolution from 1950-2000... that's about 50 years where we pretty much existed in a 540-vertical resoltution world. The temporary stop-gate of 720 displays was less about necessary technical evolution and more about manufacturers trying to milk sales at an interum step with HD-lite displays in order to preserve future sales again with 1080 products.

We've had affordable 1080 for what... 4-5 years now? Considering that we lived with 540 resolution for 10 times as long it seems odd to start complaining that we're not moving to ultra-resolution more quickly. I'm sure by 2020 you'll have your 4K Display... even if we have no native 4K source material to enjoy (but 1080 scaled to 4K could look stunning, especially at wide viewing angles).

Yeah, no kidding.
You have to love exponential growth once it takes off. I'm wondering if this exponential growth will apply to LED brightness. If Casio is any indication, it sure seems so.
What did LED brightness start off? like 20 lumen, not too long ago.
Now you can buy a 200 lumen PJ for ~500 bucks, and now Casio brings us this.

Now we have to wait until CPU's can fit inside our blood cells in around 20 more years, and maybe we'll stick around long enough to see a holodeck equivalent if they find a way to repair cell damage.

By 2020, i think we'll be at a point where pixels no longer matter for any size screen btw.

A square pixel 1920x1080 resolution is about all the average human eye can resolve when viewing from a distance of 3 screen heights and has been the HD target planned resolution for 15-20 years now. Certainly for computer displays, home full wall displays and very expensive home theater settings people will want more someday. But 1080p displays are certainly not the weakest link in the chain these days.

So it is indeed a good place to pause for awhile and I'm fairly pleased it is becoming the standard.

- Tom

Sorry if this has already been mentioned, but for those that are curious, based on the video I took of one of these Casio projectors at CES with a Casio camera I have that does high speed video, it looks to me like these have an equivalent colorwheel speed of about 3x. I just based that on doing video at 1000 fps and looking at how many frames each color primary seemed to stay up. I could check the video again just to make sure, but that was my estimate when I checked it at the show.

EDIT: I checked the video again and it looks like the equivalent colorwheel speed would be about 2x, not 3x.

--Darin

Can you share video you shot ? (youtube or so)

sign me up! I've been waiting for this tech for 3-4 years.