Hybrid Laser Projectors Seen Residing in High-End Home Theaters

Cost is defining that split, executives said. Movie theater installations such as the Seattle Cinerama Theater outfitted with a Christie 4K system are running close to $1 million including the projector, they said. The home theater business for hybrids will focus on $40,000-$50,000 projectors up to 10,000 lumens, they said. Digital Projection has been shopping its HIGHLite Laser hybrid, which ships late this month, to custom installers, Phil Laney, Digital Projection director of innovation and visualization, told us. The HIGHLite Laser uses a single 0.67-inch DLP chip with 1080p resolution and delivers 10,000 lumens, Laney said. China-based supplier Avanza has been shipping a hybrid in China for control rooms that also uses a 0.67-inch DLP chip and is priced at $42,000, CEO Fei Yan said. It delivers 7,000 lumens of brightness with a goal of increasing that in some models to 20,000 lumens, Yan said. “We showed these at a home theater show a couple weeks ago and got a lot of interest, but these aren’t your typical consumers,” said Laney, referring to demos of the HIGHLite Laser.

The first of the RGB laser-based models from Christie Digital and NEC are expected to arrive this fall, while a projector Barco jointly developed with Imax has landed deals with Cinemark and Santikos movie theater chains in the U.S. Christie will ship $30 million in laser projector equipment this year, 66 percent of which has already been delivered or is on order, said Donald Shaw, director of product management at Christie Entertainment Solutions. Barco and Christie each will ship a “couple dozen” of laser projectors to movie theaters this year, those companies said. NEC is targeting delivering a “few hundred” by mid-2015 largely in Latin America, where installations of digital projectors are just getting underway, said Richard McPherson, product manager for projectors at NEC Display Solutions.

Initial laser projectors from Barco, Christie and NEC will be built around Texas Instruments’ 1.38-inch DLP 4K chips, while Sony’s models will use the company’s LCoS technology. But the approaches to the projectors differ. Barco is housing its six RGB lasers inside a single projector that is paired with a Dolby 3D color separation system in a strategy that it says will allow it to gain market share by allowing movie theaters to easily replace dual-stacked Xenon lamp-based projectors. Barco’s single-projector approach also allows between 2D and 3D and uses 38 percent less power than lamp-based models, said Bill Beck, Barco’s newly hired product evangelist and former president of Laser Light Engines, which supplies the lasers for Barco. Christie is using two separate laser-projectors linked via fiber for 3D to create a system that can deliver 42-45 percent of the available light to the screen for 3D, versus 15-16 percent in some lamp-equipped models. And NEC is using a hybrid approach of a blue laser and red and green phosphors to develop a less expensive projector.

Amid the different product strategies and prices, driving down component costs through volume efficiency will be a big key toward gaining market supremacy, Beck said. The commercial market for laser projectors will likely be dominated by premium movie-theater venues in the U.S. and Canada, Beck said. “Now that we have passed through the commercialization barrier” for laser projectors, it is going to bring more laser device competition and the market could start to move a lot faster than it has in the past,” Beck said.