CEDIA 2016

Thor, as we all know, is the hammer-wielding god from Norse mythology. Thor is also the name of Barco’s Residential’s flagship 4K projector, a refrigerator-size 4K DLP model that sells for nearly $400,000. Why would anyone pay that much for a video projector? Maybe you want the image in your home theater to not only match, but exceed the quality of your local cinema, even those RPX and ETX ones they charge a premium ticket price for.

The Thor’s dual-laser light engine allows it to deliver 18,000 lumens brightness even on screens as large as the cinema-size Stewart Filmscreen model Barco used in its demo. More important, the image looked perfectly uniform, with rich color and deep blacks evident on the wide range of movie clips and trailers that were played from both server-based and Ultra HD Blu-ray sources.

Although Barco didn’t have a static sample for me to photograph, Pat Bradley of Display Development, the calibrator tasked with the company’s CEDIA setup, was good enough to whisk me behind the scenes to get a shot of the Thor in action. Behold the hammer of the home theater gods.