Projector Reviews

Price: $15,000 (short throw), $18,000 (long throw) At A Glance: Exceptional shadow detail • Razor-sharp picture • Excellent optics • A few tweaks would be welcome

DLP’s Crowning Achievement

The Marantz VP-11S1 was one of the first 1080p projectors I had the opportunity to review. It served as my reference projector for quite a while and is still one of the best 1080p projectors I’ve seen. Since the VP-11S1’s release, Marantz has brought two more 1080p offerings to the table, the VP-15S1, which offers stunning performance at a more affordable price point, and now, the flagship VP-11S2.

The Marantz VP-12S1 1,280-by-720 one-chip DLP projector is certainly a contender for the best product in its category. The new crop of high-resolution, 16:9, one-chip DLP projectors delivers significantly better picture quality than the earlier 4:3-chip designs. The VP-12S1 is extremely well built, provides superb video processing for NTSC sources, falls in the middle of the category's price range, and therefore represents a really solid value.

One giant leap closer to CRT.

Marantz's VP-12S2, the company's top-of-the-line one-chip DLP projector, has a native resolution of 1,280:720 and utilizes the latest Texas Instruments HD2 Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) chip. This new chip offers a significant increase in contrast ratio and black-level performance over last year's VP-12S1 model. The VP-12S2's video processing also incorporates Faroudja's proprietary DCDi deinterlacing for video-based sources and 3:2 pulldown for film-based material. In fact, Marantz uses the full Faroudja chipset, which includes the video decoder, the video enhancer, the 2D comb filter, and DCDi. The latest Marantz DLP offering is definitely one of the top performers in its category.

As faithful readers with good memories will recall, I reported that after checking out various DLP and LCD projectors, I settled on the Marantz VP-12S2 as providing the best overall performance, and bought one to serve as a reference in my home theater system. (See my "Take 2" of the VP-12S2 in the November 2003 issue, and the sidebar in my review of the Primare SP31.7 and A30.5 Mk.II in January 2004; see also Peter Putman's original review of the VP-12S2 in May 2003.) For the past year I've been enjoying the VP-12S2 a great deal, and whenever I saw demos of DLP or LCD projectors at shows and dealers, I felt ever so slightly smug that the picture quality I was getting at home was better.

<A HREF="http://www.ultimateavmag.com/videoprojectors/506marantzvp11s1/">Marantz' VP-11S1</A> was the first 1080p DLP front projector I reviewed, and while many less expensive 1080p projectors have come through the doors since then, none has matched that projector's all around performance. I liked it so well I put my money where my mouth was, buying it to use as my reference projector for some time.

Mitsubishi has been a market leader for some time in the business and professional world, offering a wide variety of LCD and DLP projectors. Regular readers of <I>Stereophile Ultimate AV</I> know Mitsubishi as a major player in rear-projection and plasma and LCD TVs, but probably haven't seen that name on a home-theater projector before.