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THE FRONT LINE: October 8, 2004 |
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Canon enters the LCoS front projection game This past Tuesday, Canon unveiled a new and different
front projector. The Realis SX50 is not a re-badged Sanyo product, but
a new-from-the-ground-up design. It uses SXGA+ (1400x1050) resolution
imaging panels (most likely sourced from JVC), weighs 8.6 pounds and
is rated at 2500 lumens brightness.
SXGA+ imaging isn’t in itself big news. JVC has had their $8,995 SX21 (13 pounds, 1500 lumens) available for over a year now, and Dukane also sells an OEM version. In the DLP arena, Christie’s DS+25 (7.7 pounds, 2500 lumens, $14,495) and projectiondesign’s F1+ SXGA+ (also 7.7 pounds, 2500 lumens, $12,995) just rolled out this year. What makes Canon’s SX50 so different is the cost: They’ve estimated the street price at $3,999, a significant drop from the competitors mentioned above. But that may be the only real significance of this projector. Canon claims to have come up with a new optical system that tightly controls horizontal and vertical planes of light to maximize light output and minimize light scattering and refraction through the polarized beam splitter, two things that lower image contrast and raise black levels. Canon calls this process AISYS, or Aspectual Illumination System for short. A largely ‘canned’ multimedia presentation about AISYS took up much of the press conference, followed by a four-way side-by-side demo of the SX50 against Hitachi’s CP-SX5600 SXGA (1365x1024) LCoS projector, BenQ’s PB7220 XGA (1024x768) DLP projector, and NEC’s MT1065 XGA (1024x768) LCD projector. Here’s where the demo fell on its face. A Canon representative showed a series of finely detailed SXGA+ images and pointed out that the SX50 had far more resolving power than the BenQ and NEC boxes, due to its higher resolution LCoS panels. No kidding! A lower-resolution projector using pixel scaling will always come up short in this kind of test. Why didn’t Canon instead stage a comparison using the Christie or projectiondesign SXGA+ DLP projectors mentioned above? That would have been more of a ‘fair fight’; comparing native SXGA+ imaging to native XGA certainly isn’t. And those of us journalists who have some knowledge of projection technology always dismiss ‘apples to oranges’ demos as pointless. While the SX50 did exhibit excellent image detail, it (like every other LCoS projector I have ever seen or tested) still does a better job with static images and graphics than it does with video. The AISYS system didn’t appear to make that much of an improvement, as the SX50’s video black levels were high – lower than the Hitachi, but about the same as the NEC projector. Truth is; although BenQ’s PB7220 was hamstrung by lower native resolution; it had the best black levels and picture contrast of any projector in this comparison. By comparison, Hitachi’s LCoS product has been around for a few years now but has never been known for having high contrast, while NEC’s MT1065 exhibited the usual washed-out polysilicon LCD ‘black’. I suspect that putting the SX50 up against either the Christie or projectiondesign SXGA+ offerings would not have been a ‘fair fight’ either, as their lower black levels and higher contrast would have been immediately apparent to all in attendance. From a standpoint of image quality, the Realsis SX50 is about average, considering it is an LCoS projector. The price point is very attractive, but immediately begs the question: How about device yields? LCoS is difficult to manufacture and I can’t think of a single LCoS projector that has sold in quantities approaching popular DLP and LCD designs. The real question is this: Can Canon get their hands on enough SXGA+ LCoS panels to sell this product in quantity? Or, will the SX50 become another ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ projector like so many other LCoS models? |
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