I spent much of my first full day at CEDIA Expo scoping out the new 1080p video projectors. I still have more to see, but it's already evident that this is the big story of the show, unless you're into various forms of home automation, which is always a big CEDIA story.

For those who are at the show, there's a good way to calibrate your eyeballs. Hop over to the FH Video room on the main exhibit floor, located directly behind the Atlantic Technology booth. FH Audio has been selling the remaining Sony G90 CRT projectors for several years now, and this year they had a G90 set up side-by-side with a Sony VPL-VW100 ("Ruby") SXRD projector, each on identical 8' screens. The same HD DVD-based source was used for both, though the processing to each projector was somewhat different since the CRT was driven with an RGB connection and the SXRD with HDMI.

The result (if you can't see it for yourself) was that the SXRD was just a hair sharper (the difference most visible on titles) and the G90 better on blacks. Dramatically better. The black background on white titles was dark gray on the SXRD, but looked virtually as dark as the screen border on the G90. This gave the CRT a little more pop on some scenes, but not as much as I expected. Remember, when new, the G90 cost around $40,000. The VPL-VW100 is $10,000.