It's that time again: the
end-of-year rush to launch the best and brightest home theater projectors for the holiday cocooning season. Epson's casting its 2009 lot with the EH-TW5500 and EH-TW4400 3LCD projectors featuring Full HD (1920x1080) resolutions, a 1600 ANSI lumen brightness, and quiet 22dB operation. The TW4400 (aka, Home Cinema 8500UB as it will be known Stateside) touts a 130000:1 contrast while the TW5500 (aka, Pro Cinema 9500UB) ratchets the hyperbole up to 200000:1 -- that's about double the claim of Epson's
previous high-enders that already featured excellent black performance. To be fair, Epson makes some of, if not
the best, home theater projectors for the money thanks to its D7 C2Fine LCD panels manufactured in-house. Other specs include 12bit video processing, improved frame interpolation and 4-4 pull-down, x.v. color mode, 2.1x optical zoom with horizontal/vertical lens shift, and a range of inputs including 2x HDMI, YUV, and RGB.
We gave the TW5500 an eyes and ears-on here are IFA in Berlin in a finely-tuned home theater setup and came away extremely impressed with the image -- enough so that we'd be tempted to layout the €3,299 European asking price (€2,799 for the TW4400) come November if only we had the space to let this baby shine. But let's wait and see what the competition has in response when
CEDIA kicks off later this week -- it's best to be informed and 3 grand ain't exactly chump change.
Read -- Press Release
Read -- Art Feierman's opinion
posted Sep 7th 2009 3:59AM
no comments
High contrast *blacks*... that's a bit... gray area...
These "contrast ratios" are usually a gimmick. They should instead detail the luminosity value of the black color on the monitor, when it is running.
Instead, they boost he contrast ratio numbers by increasing the lamp luminosity- which keeps the "black" color, grayish, while giving a dazzling white that no one really needs.
hmm true that.
btw engadget removed my profile picture! now I can't upload any pic at all. none works.that sucks
no respect for that to them
But you said no comments. How can you go back on your word like that? What message does it send to the children, eh?
Who is measuring these contrast ratios? No one! Dumb is as dumb does.
I can't wait to see the next year model. Looks like both Epson and Panny are running out of improvement on their latest and greatest. Just tweak here and there. Might as well get the older model and save couple of hundred buck.
I read high contrast black Germans. I thought that was a little odd.
I read the same
nice job with the headline. i LOL'd
wake me when they make an affordable high res LED projector.
I'd rather just let you sleep. Or smother you with your own pillow I haven't decided.
If the technology doesn't interest you then why do you f*cking waste your time commenting?