Marantz 1080p And Follow-Up
Dear Gary:
Congratulations to Greg Rogers for his outstanding article on the new Marantz 1080p. It was a pleasure and very instructive to read from the first to the last sentence. Keep up the pressure on the manufacturers!
Based on my recent experience of DLP 1080p versus three-panel SXRD front projectors (Ruby), I agree with Greg that DLP is significantly superior in terms of image depth, clarity, and 3-D cinema “feeling.”
Now that we have Holy Grail native 1920 x 1080p/24 high-definition sources, the next critical steps for TI/DLP front projectors are in my opinion to:
• accept 1080p/24 native signals via HDMI and be able to process them in 48 Hz, 72 Hz, and 96 Hz
• replace ultra-high pressure lamp+ color wheel by LED or laser illumination, as it is becoming the case for MD RPTV
• perform perfect V-stretch on the 1920 x 1080p signals so that we can use anamorphic lens to fully enjoy CinemaScope
• improve the optical characteristics of the lens
With these features, DLP front projectors will be sensational.
Regarding LED and Laser illumination for front projectors, an article on the current status of these breakthrough technologies would be great.
Thank you for the great work.
Hervé Girsault, Geneva, herve.girsault@wanadoo.fr
Dear Gary:
I just realized that I failed to copy you on my correspondence with Dan Miller following my e-mail to you (all below).
I spent some time re-reading some of the most recent issues of Widescreen Review last Sunday (with a cool beer next to me). It was very enjoyable and very instructive as a second reading.
May I suggest something. Obviously with the advent of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc, it becomes very important to know if the 1920 x 1080 front projectors:
• accept native 1080p/24 and 1080p/48 Hz signals and can display them at 1920 x 1080p/48 Hz as such, without performing any frame rate conversion
• have an option to perform V-stretch on 1980 x 1080p signals and do it well
• deliver an excellent image (uniformity, quality and geometry) when using an anamorphic lens (Panamorph or others)
Inserting in each of your HD front projector reviews a small table or section with the relevant responses to these questions would be tremendous (as you did for the Marantz).
Without flattery, your reviews are the ones that many people I know, and I, rely on to make decisions. Indeed, it is almost “mission impossible” to get reliable opinions or responses even from most of the manufacturers.
For instance, I just inquired directly with Sharp, both in the U.S. and in Europe, whether the new SHARP XV-Z 20000 (USA) or 21000 (Europe) accepts native 1080p/24 (and 1080p/48 Hz ) signals via its HDMI input, and whether it was able to display them at 1080p/48 Hz, without any frame rate conversion or other weird things. The response was simply, “we do not know, and it will be very difficult to find out…” I didn’t bother asking about V-stretch capability!
So, I will have to wait for your review of the Sharp projector in order to find out.
Below is the response Marantz’s Dan Miller emailed to me:
Dear Hervé,
Thanks for your kind words. It means a great deal to know that our customers are aware of the quality that we continue to engineer into our products.
I wanted to inform you about several points that you bring up.
While we have next-generation sources being stored on disc as 1080p/24, it will be quite some time before the players will actually deliver that output. However...
The VP-11S1 will accept a 1080p/24 source TODAY and deliver it to the screen as 1080p/48. There is no need for 72 or 96, because there is no flicker in a DLP. One image is displayed continuously until the next one arrives. In digital cinema, the images are actually displayed as 1080p/24. But the important point of no-motion-judder is realized currently in our current product.
LED illumination is available, but not in the brightness levels required for front projection. RPTV images are much smaller and utilize higher gain screens to deliver brightness. However we are watching the market closely. In the meantime, the color wheel in the VP-11 spins at 6x (10,800 rpm), which virtually eliminates RBE, particularly because we use a chassis of cast aluminum, which supports the motor and wheel with extreme stability for very precise timing. Lasers have not been shown anywhere yet outside of a lab, but we have high hopes.
The V-Stretch works perfectly on HD sources. Greg’s sample was early production and has been updated already in firmware. It was the plan from the beginning to have this, and we will be offering the lens-and-sled solution within the month.
Our optics cannot be improved. We have had the best projection lens since the VP-12 was introduced five years ago. When that product was designed, there was no competition. We were the first 16:9 DLP home theatre projector on the market. As such, we had to look to the DLP cinema world for design tips. Since every DLP cinema projector in use utilizes a Minolta zoom lens, it seemed logical to use Minolta as our source. Our lens is a smaller version of the D-Cinema lens and is custom designed to match the MTF and the optical characteristics of the 0.95-inch DMD. It uses 14 all-glass elements and is multi-coated, color corrected, aspherical, and apochromatic. There is absolutely nothing that can be improved on our lens, and Greg commented on our advanced optical design. Our lens costs as much as some competitive projectors.
Again, thanks for the support. It is customers like you that make all of the work that we do worth it.
Best regards,
Dan Miller, Product Manager, Video and Loudspeakers, Marantz America, http://us.marantz.com/
201 762 6557
Hervé Girsault, Geneva
mailto:herve.girsault@wanadoo.fr
Video Technical Editor Greg Rogers Comments:
Thank you for your generous comments about our projector reviews. By now I'm sure you have read my Sharp XV-Z20000 review in Issue 116. It answers your specific question about 1080p24 compatibility. I also discuss aspect ratio features and scaling in each review, so if a projector has built-in support for using an external anamorphic lens it is covered. I agree that lens quality is very important and I comment on lens performance, such as focus and chromatic aberration (including the effect of lens shift), and what affect they may have on image sharpness and resolution. Lens quality also affects intra-image contrast, which is characterized by my modified-ANSI contrast ratio measurement in each review. I also look forward to LEDs (or perhaps eventually laser illumination) replacing UHP/SHP Mercury and Xenon lamps for front projection, but it's still too early to predict when that will happen.
You can E-mail Widescreen Review @ mailto:editorgary@widescreenreview.com