Premiere Design

Normally in this blog, I profile extreme products based solely on information provided by the manufacturer, not on personal experience. However, the D-73d projector from Runco is a different story—I got to spend an entire day with it at the company's training facility near Portland, Oregon, where Runco moved after being acquired by Planar. Helping me was Erik Guslawski, eastern regional product specialist, and Bob Williams, chief product architect and recent guest on my Home Theater Geeks podcast.

Because there's so much to write about, I'm going to split this report into several parts. First, I'll cover the features of the D-73d, then I'll focus on my experiences with the projector at Runco, including measurements and watching real-world content.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of my report on the Runco D-73d 3D DLP projector, I covered its features in some detail. Now, it's time to reveal what we measured while working with it at Runco's training facility near Portland, Oregon. Helping me was Erik Guslawski, eastern regional product specialist, and Bob Williams, chief product architect and recent guest on my Home Theater Geeks podcast.

Anyone who knows high-end video knows Runco, which is now the high-end home-cinema division of Oregon-based Planar. Among Runco's many well-regarded projectors, the premier line is undoubtedly the Signature Cinema series, which now includes two brand new models.

I've written about line-array speakers in this blog several times, and for good reason&#151;tall stacks of drivers deliver smooth horizontal dispersion and sound levels that fall off more gradually than point-source speakers, creating a coherent, open soundstage. That's the idea behind the so-called iso-linear speakers from American maker <A href="http://www.scaena.com">Scaena</A>, whose name is Latin for "stage."

I'm always casting about for interesting high-end products to feature in this blog, so I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually find the
FH001 speaker from a British company called <A href="http://www.fergusonhill.co.uk/">Ferguson Hill</A>. As soon as I saw a photo of this intriguing design, I knew I had to profile it here.

When Sharp introduced the LC-70LE732U at CES in January, everyone was suitably impressed with its large screen—at 70 inches diagonally, it's the largest LCD TV intended for the consumer marketplace, providing 62 percent more viewing area than a 55-inch screen. Last week, the company announced it is now shipping this monster to major electronics retailers nationwide.