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A few large manufacturers excepted, most of the video projection industry seems in no big rush to get into 3D. As a result, there was plenty of 2D projection action at this year’s CEDIA Expo, a gathering in Atlanta this week of custom installers...

Among all the super-expensive projectors at CEDIA, some of the biggest buzz has been about Epson's entry into the LCoS market, which turns out not to be entirely true. In fact, Epson has developed a new but related imaging technology it calls "3LCD Reflective," which is basically liquid crystal on quartz instead of silicon. (Keep in mind that quartz is silicon dioxide, so maybe it's not that different after all.)

Projectiondesign's press conference concentrated on the Optix SuperWide 235 (around $39,000 with a standard lens), whose DLP imaging chip boasts a native resolution of 2560x1600, though this model uses only 1080 horizontal lines. This projector can display any aspect ratio from 1.33:1 to 2.40:1 at constant height without needing an anamorphic lens or zoom memories, which rob the image of brightness. For wide-screen Blu-rays, it scales the image vertically and horizontally using Sigma Designs VXP processing and two custom FPGA (field-programmable gate array) chips to fill the 2560x1080 pixel structure and maintain a 12-bit color depth per channel.

The demo was shown on a 13-foot-wide Da-Lite Affinity screen (1.1 gain) with a hand-built prototype with only one of two lamps in operation, so we were seeing a peak-level of about 7.5 foot-lamberts. Clips from Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Spider-Man 3 looked quite good, though I would not have chosen Paul Blart—what an awful movie!

SIM2 has expanded its Mico line of LED-illuminated DLP projectors with the Mico 40 ($16,000) and Mico 60ST ($24,000), which is designed for short-throw rear-projection applications.