CEDIA Expo is back with a vengeance this year, in Dallas, TX. And one product in particular is generating a lot of buzz. It's Christie Digital's "Eclipse" projector, which custom installer Absolute Ultimate AV brought to the show for a live demonstration. The Eclipse is a 4K DLP-based home theater projector that show attendees are saying offers "OLED-like picture quality." This is high praise indeed as OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) televisions are currently the best you can buy. But they currently max out at 97 inches, which just isn't big enough for a large home theater, particularly if you want to go ultra wide with a CinemaScope screen.
OLED TVs have individual self-emitting pixels. This allows the TV to turn on or off any one of the over eight million pixels on a 4K TV producing outstanding black levels and contrast. And while high-end 3-chip DLP projectors are known for producing high quality moving pictures, Christie's Eclipse projector takes this to the next level.
The Eclipse uses not one but two individual 3-chip DLP modules. This effectively gives the projector pixel-level control of individual brightness, similar to an OLED display. In simple terms, one of the 3-chip modules operates in black and white mode to provide the brightness for each pixel, the other 3-chip module operates in color mode to provide all of the millions of colors that appear on screen. Three separate lasers (one each for red, green and blue) provide the illumination, resulting in high brightness, excellent color reproduction, high dynamic range and contrast and an extremely long life span.
This dual module design is similar to Sony's professional LCD monitor: the 32-inch dual cell BVMHX310. That's a 32-inch professional monitor which sells for $35,000. That display uses two distinct LCD panels: one operates in black and white mode as an effective "local-dimming backlight", the other operates in color. This allows the monitor to exceed the contrast levels, black level performance and picture uniformity of a traditional single cell LED/LCD display. The Christie projector operates on a similar principle.
The Eclipse was originally designed for professional theater installations. In fact, the company developed the projector for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 2019 for their Hayden planetarium. They delivered six Eclipse projectors for this implementation. That custom array of six projectors simulates the night sky (where true black levels are very important) and creates a truly immersive theatrical experience in the theater's 87-foot diameter, 429-seat digital dome. That system has also been getting rave reviews and won a Thea Award for Innovative Technology.
The Christie Eclipse earned Projector Central's "Best of Cedia Expo" award for 2022. Our friend Mark Henninger, Editor in Chief of Sound and Vision saw the Eclipse in action and had this to say: "The result is a viewing experience that definitively surpasses anything I have seen come from a projector... Simply put, you have to see it to believe it." Read more about his impressions here.
If you want to see one of these in your own home theater, better bring your wallet as the Eclipse projector sells for $400,000. You'll also need an appropriate place to put it as the Eclipse measures in at 41.5 x 31 x 33.5 inches and weighs about 330 pounds.
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