Canon introduces the REALiS X700 and SX7 projectors

Your friendly Canon buddies are rolling out some new REALiS projectors today, clearly hoping to maintain its strong ties with people who love projectors of all shapes and sizes. The two new flavors are called the SX7 (pictured) and the X700, the former being a high-end, HD-ready, Adobe RGB-accurate model, with a 1440 x 1050 resolution, while the latter is a more entry-level offering, with a lower, 1024 x 768 resolution, and no color matching. Both projectors tout 3,000 hours of lamp life, a 1.7x zoom lens, DVI inputs with HDCP encryption, plus three stereo inputs and one set of outputs. The X700 will be available in October for $3,999, and the SX7 will hit stores in December at the Earth-shatteringly low price of $6,999.

[Via Akihabara News]

[Josh Warner @ Sep 20th 2007 2:05PM]

I don't understand why all projectors fail to standardize on either 1280 or 1920 pixels wide. 1440 in all practical respects is useless, whereas the other two are natively HD-no pixel streching required. These things are not CRTs, and native resolution is a huge deal.

There really isn't a reason why this could not be done. Any wisdom out there? The "for presentations" argument is bogus - 1280 and 1920 work just as well, and laptops' native resolutions fail to matter when the VGA-out is enabled (for instance, my D610 has a native rez of 1024x768, but can output any resolution up to 2048 pixels wide using the VGA).