Marantz VP8600 single-chip DLP. More information at www.ultimateavmag.com/news/091105cedia3/

Walking the show floor at CEDIA Expo it quickly becomes obvious that this is a show specializing in two things: video displays and custom install gear. While I tried to see everything, my beat at this show was video displays of all sorts, as long as they weren't flat panels. While it may seem that hang-on-the-wall plasmas—now increasingly called PDPs—and LCDs are dominating the business, there was still plenty of other video stuff to drool over.

I covered many of the new front projectors in my daily reports from the show floor (www.ultimateavmag.com/news/090805cedia01/, www.ultimateavmag.com/news/090905cedia02/, www.ultimateavmag.com/news/091105cedia3/). Included in those reports were two major developments: the consolidation of 1080p—at least on the display side—as a major factor in the market, and the continuing price erosion in video displays, including projectors. The latter is great news for the consumer, but not so hot for manufacturers and dealers.

On the 1080p front there was plenty of news. Sony introduced a new, lower-priced, 1920x1080 SXRD projector, the VPL VW100. Following on the heels of Sony's launch of two relatively affordable rear projection SXRD models several weeks before the show (www.ultimateavmag.com/news/082205Sony/), this was certainly no surprise. But what was surprising about the new projector was the price: $10,000, with an expected availability date sometime this coming November.

The VPL-VW100 is equipped with a Xenon lamp, though at 400W it's smaller and less tightly specified than the lamp in its big brother, the Qualia 004. The Qualia remains in the line, and Sony announced an update for both new and existing units in the field that will allow it to accept a 1080p/60fps source.

As demonstrated, the VPL-VW100 didn't really didn't strut its stuff as well as I suspect it can. Both times I dropped by the booth Sony was showing the same high-def football clips, with slightly blown out whites and a lack of image depth. This may have been the fault of the program material, or an attempt to wow the crowd with more brightness than the projector can comfortably deliver on a big screen. But the first time I saw the Qualia 004 in prototype form it too had setup issues that were clearly irrelevant by the time we tested it in May of 2004. Needless to say, we expect big things from the production version of the VPL-VW100. It's near the top of our review wish-list. This is the one product introduced at the show that has the potential to be a category killer, and produce serious insomnia in the competition if Sony can hold to the forecast price while producing it in sufficient numbers to satisfy the inevitable demand.

The other big 1080p push was from Texas Instruments with its new 1920x1080 Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). Yes, I know you thought TI already had a 1080p chip—the one that's just starting to show up in big rear-projection DLP sets, all touting "1080p is here!" Yes, there is such a chip already, and 1080p resolution (though not, to any significant extent, native 1080p program material) is here now in sets using it. But that current chip actually has only 960x1080 pixels; the horizontal resolution is increased to 1920 by using an additional mirror that shifts the entire image back and forth a half-pixel every 1/120th of a second. Thus, a full 1920x1080 pixels do appear on screen every 1/60th of a second, though whether or not this clever sleight of hand trick works as well as claimed is yet to be proven. Sets using it are just beginning to hit the slippery review slopes.

While this so-called "wobulation" chip may ultimately work fine for rear projection sets, it isn't really designed for front projectors and big screens. The new chip launched at the show does have a full 1920x1080 pixel array. It will be fun to watch rear projector manufacturers, after they inevitably glom onto this chip for their next generation of premium sets, explain how their 1080p models for 2007 are a vast improvement over their 1080p sets for 2006. They'll need a distinctive name for these new chips—Pixel Perfect 1080p, perhaps?

But I digress. This new chip was designed for use in both single- and three-chip front projectors. And TI's demo, showing it in both applications on big screens (I'd estimate about 12-feet diagonal), was an eye-opener. TI traditionally uses the best of everything for their demos, so what they showed may or may not translate to more "affordable" designs. But it was definitely a knockout event with bright, crisp, beautifully colored images and no lack of good blacks and contrast. They were even brave enough to show a tough, dark scene from Sin City.

There has been speculation in various online forums that TI used a native 1080p source for this demo. But TI's front projection manager, Joe Siddall, later confirmed to me that the source material was 1080i, not 1080p. It was deinterlaced to 1080p using processing from Silicon Optix.

Prediction: we'll see more prototypes of 1080p single-chip projectors using this new DMD at CES 2006this coming January, and perhaps three-chippers as well. But I'd be surprised if the new projectors actually ship in quantity before mid-2006.

With competition rapidly eroding the prices consumers expect to pay for today's 1280x720 projectors, I suspect that single-chip 1080p designs will muscle those lower-rez projectors out of the $10,000-$15,000 slot in most manufacturers' catalogs by late 2006. The only company independently demonstrating a single-chip 1920x1080 projector at CEDIA, Projection Design, offered no specific shipping date or pricing, but speculated that their single-chip projector would sell "in the $20,000's." My guess, particularly with the competition from Sony's new SXRD, is that a single-chip projector at that price, even one offering 1920x1080, will be a very hard sell.

Among new projection screen offerings from Screen Research, DNP, and Stewart Filmscreen stood out—at least for those wanting to watch their projectors with the lights on. Danish screen manufacturer DNP has the Supernova screen, said to provide high contrast under high ambient lighting. Screen Research was featuring their Mirage screen, based on the same technology. And Stewart also offers its version of an ambient-light-friendly screen. But the big announcement from Stewart was its 2.35:1 CineCurve screen with motorized masking for the center 1.78:1 area. This curved screen (you probably guessed that from the name) designed for dark rooms. It is available in a variety of materials and gains, but at an approximate price of around $18,000 (depending on size and material) it isn't for everyone.

I won't go into the flood of new rear projection sets I saw at the show. Most of them have already been covered in extensive detail on UAV, both in our reports from last spring's line shows

www.ultimateavmag.com/news/070405Pioneer/

www.ultimateavmag.com/news/041805Mits/

http://ultimateavmag.com/news/052305toshiba/) and in our daily CEDIA show reports (see earlier links). But one setup not mentioned in those earlier reports is Optoma's BigVizion. Said to offer a 1080p DLP resolution (no mention as to which TI 1080 chip it will use), it's a customizable and modular 100-inch or 80-inch rear projection set designed to be either custom installed or built into a wall. At $20,000 it's really closer to a classic rear projection, separate projector and screen setup than a one-box, rear projection set. It's aimed—natch—directly at the custom install market.

Finally—ta-dah—my very own picks for the best projection demos at the show. They were, in no particular order, the new Yamaha DPX-1300 (apparently virtually identical to the DPX-1200 except in one significant respect: it now uses scaling and deinterlacing from Silicon Optix), the Texas Instruments 1080p demo, and the new C3X, three-chip DLP from SIM2 (more detail on the latter at (http://ultimateavmag.com/news/073005SIM2/, and on both the Yamaha and the SIM2 in links given earlier to the daily reports from the show floor).

All three really stood out in all the most important characteristics of a video display—color, brightness, detail, contrast, and (where needed) deinterlacing and scaling. It's also interesting to note that two of the three (the SIM2 and Yamaha) were 1280x720. The old Mustang has life in her yet.

There were a lot of impressive-looking projectors at the show this year. In fact, the superior big-screen images greatly outnumbered the mediocre ones—but with the caveat that the inevitable variations in screen sizes, screen materials, program material, and setup all take their toll. Still, these three really had me picking my jaw up off the floor.