/ Asahi/Guangzhou, April 01, 2022 -- The initial application scenario of projectors is commercial, but in recent years, home projectors have emerged rapidly and gradually become the mainstream of the projector industry. This market is bigger than commercial and has more potential for development. Compared with traditional TV, there are some disadvantages, but also its own natural advantages.
As the absolute hegemon of the traditional projector market, Epson has its natural advantages in the commercial machine market. Its higher quality and more stable performance have won a large number of markets for it. However, at the same time, its presence in the home intelligent projection market is relatively weak and its power is late.
So what's the rationale for the rapid rise of home projectors? What are the advantages and problems of Epson in the traditional projector market, and what is the actual experience of Epson home projectors today? This article will focus on these three questions.
First, the rise of the home projector
Statistics show that after 2013, with the rise of the home projector market, the overall shipment of projectors began to grow rapidly. Except for a small decline in the impact of the epidemic in 2020, the other years were growing rapidly, and the market size increased from 2 million units in 2014 to more than 4 million units in 2020. At the same time, the proportion of home projectors increased rapidly, accounting for 52% in 2018 and 72% in 2020, which is expected to continue to grow in the future. Home projectors have become the absolute main force and growth engine of the entire projector market.
I think there are three fundamental reasons for this:
One is oversized projection, the larger the size of the screen, the more enjoyable the movie, the stronger the sense of atmosphere. This has become a consumer consensus, and so has traditional TVS, which are growing in size overall. But for traditional TV, when the size increases to a certain extent, it will face a series of problems.
For example, the handling of the problem, China's house to residential high-rise and multi-storey, the size of the elevator and stairs are limited, so we often see the video of oversized TV lifting into the household, but this thing still has its limitations: one is that most of the modern Windows are system Windows, the need to remove the window before lifting; At the same time, for the mature community, hoisting is strictly limited. For daily safety, the weight of oversized TV is too large, the wall installation is not safe, more choice is the bracket, if there is a skin child at home, it will be very dangerous.
However, projectors do not have this problem. A projector of regular size can easily project a picture of 100 inches or 120 inches. For example, this projector in my home can project a picture of over 120 inches, which is simple and convenient, and the picture quality is still good. With the development of social economy and the rapid popularization of all kinds of smart screens, the functions of living room TV are also changing rapidly. TV used to be the main entertainment body of the family, but now it has become more special equipment for some specific moments, such as watching movies.
The main wall of the traditional living room is generally used as a TV wall, but the modern young people are changing this design, preferring to make the main wall of the living room into a bookcase + storage wall. In front of the bookcase, a curtain is installed, which can be put down when watching and withdrawn when not watching, which greatly saves space.
For modern urban housing with expensive land, this is very attractive. Most of my friends who buy home projectors are matching the living room bookcase to use them.
Three is the price, the overall price of more than 100 inches of TV is still high, even if the price of the two years of giant screen TV rapidly decline, but the overall price and projector compared, still a lot of expensive, handling costs are larger; And there's an increased risk of damage, especially with small children in the house, which can easily ruin or crash the screen, further driving up the cost of using a big screen.
Of course, home projectors come with their own problems:
One is brightness, which leads to the use of the projector in the bright living room during the day is limited, because our projection wall or curtain itself is bright, so in bright light, the picture of the darkest spot is actually the brightness of the screen or wall itself, which will cause the picture contrast decline; Another problem is picture quality, cheap projectors overall picture color performance, is still weak.
Because of this, brightness has become a very important point in our projector selection, contrast is the ratio of the highest brightness and the lowest brightness, when the lowest brightness is limited, the brighter the highlighted area, the better the contrast and the perception of the whole picture, high brightness machine in a relatively bright environment is very obvious improvement in the perception, which is why I choose Epson projection.
Second, the advantages of Epson home projector - 3LCD and single-chip DLP technology comparison
Epson is the hegemon of the traditional projector market, but it started late in the home projector market. I guess one reason is the system. Traditional commercial projectors only provide a large screen, and the content is released by the desktop, but the home is not.
With the support of Tencent Video · Aurora TV intelligent TV system content platform, Epson can meet the needs of home projection. It is this extra point that highlights the advantages of Epson's picture quality and brightness. For projectors, the most core must be the light source display and lens, light source display part, Epson uses 3LCD display unit, and the domestic mainstream projector is single-chip DLP technology.
3LCD, as the name implies, is three LCD panels, the main light source through the spectroscope, red, green, blue three monochromatic light beam, three light beams through the light path guidance, hit the three LCD panels, become the LCD panel backlight source, and then through the internal light path guidance, out of the lens to form a complete color picture. Single-chip DLP technology is different, the light source will be hit the DMD digital microreflector through a special rotating color wheel, the single pixel on the reflector control can be freely controlled, through the reflector pixel reflection plate Angle adjustment, the opening and closing of a single pixel, and the color wheel is composed of red, green and blue filters, in the rotation of the color wheel, red, green and blue, respectively through the color wheel. To control the color of the picture. That is to say, the projector with single-chip DLP technology only displays one color per moment. When the rotation speed of the color wheel is high enough, the alternating speed of red, green and blue will be accelerated, and the visual effect of color picture can be formed by using the visual retention effect of human eyes.
Because of the inherent characteristics of the principle, only one color light can pass through the color wheel at every moment, and other light is absorbed by the color wheel. Therefore, the overall light source utilization rate of single-chip DLP is low, and the brightness and color brightness are relatively lower. In addition, because the three-color processing of single-chip DLP technology is not synchronized, it is easy to form a rainbow effect, and the overall color depth performance will be lower, so we will find that single-chip DLP projectors are generally 8bit color depth screen, that is, 16.7 million color, while 3LCD screens are mostly 10bit color depth, that is, 1 billion color screen.
Of course, high-end DLP products will use three-color DLP technology, in advance through the spectroscope to decompose the light source into three colors of light, three colors of light at the same time processing, can avoid these problems, but at the same time the overall system complexity and cost will be greatly increased, leading to its use in the home projector market less.
Third, CH-TW5700T real machine experience
CH-TW5700T is a relatively mainstream household projector product of Epson, with a maximum brightness of 2700 ISO lm, Jingdong price 5799:
ISO lm and ANSI lm are brightness data tested under two different Standards. ANSI(American National Standards Institute) is the American standard. the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international standard. ANSI only established nine-point measurement methods but standardization. ISO regulates the production standards of projectors at the same time, more strictly defines the measurement standards, including the power of the bulb, the impact of noise on brightness and so on. Projectors using ISO data tend to be slightly brighter with the same ANSI and ISO brightness data because ISO testing standards are more stringent.
Another point is to distinguish the brightness of the light source from the standard brightness. Some low-end projection opportunities advertise the brightness of the light source, but this is not accurate. Compared to the standard test brightness, the brightness of the light source is usually many times higher.
Because 5700T brightness is higher, so the picture performance is good in the cloudy environment during the day: we can look at the ambient brightness: in the cloudy environment, the living room + French window can still meet the normal viewing, of course, if it is direct sunlight in a sunny day, it is still recommended to draw the curtains.
For projectors, contrast is a key indicator, but we need to note that the optical and mechanical indicators do not represent the actual look, because neither the projection curtain nor the projection wall is black, so the contrast should be the ratio between the brightness of the projector and the brightness of the projection curtain, which is why we need higher brightness machines, and, It is better to look and feel in a dark environment. In order to obtain a good viewing effect, it is necessary to conduct some environmental shading.
In the context of my demonstration, you can look at the picture quality of the different images: In addition to the system resources and the brightness of the image, there are several points worth noting about this projector:
First, support 10bit color depth, the overall color continuity is better, will not appear obvious picture color fault;
Second, the lens supports 1.2 times optical zoom. Under the same projection distance, the picture size can be adjusted automatically without any loss of picture quality. There is a zoom lever and a focus lever at the top of the lens, which is well-damped and feels good in the hand. Pure optical zoom, can maximize the stability of the zoom process, this is much better than digital cutting magnification. Third, the correction range of the camera is very large, can support forward shot, side shot, tilt shot and tilt shot, my above picture is the tilt shot. The lens has a special lens protection cover, which can be closed when not in use to prevent the ash from being used for a long time. Fourth, support GAMMA adjustment, can adapt to different picture light and dark part brightness, so that the picture details more rich.
Fifth, support wireless screen, can directly put the phone resources into the projector, simple and convenient, this praise.
Of course, there is a problem with the projector, because of the long focal length projection, there will be an obvious separation of sound and picture characteristics, so if you want to get a better sound and picture experience, it is recommended to match a set of special Bluetooth speaker as a sound source, so that the overall experience will be better.
summary
For the choice of entry-level home projectors, I have said a point of view, try not to buy a traditional projector, but to smart projectors, even if the traditional projector picture performance is better, but the additional content equipment will be very troublesome. Epson is clearly aware of this and has teamed up with Tencent Video Aurora TV to solve the problem of supplying TV content. After the content problem is solved, the picture quality advantage of traditional projectors becomes its core competitiveness, which is very important. For picture quality, the core point is actually two, one is brightness, it determines your adaptation to the environment, especially in the daytime; The other is color. The 3LCD technology adopted by Epson, three-color light source synchronization processing, can greatly improve the efficiency of light utilization, so as to achieve a higher picture brightness under the same power, reduce the processing of asynchronous rainbow lines and screen flash problems, three-color light synchronization processing, can also get better color depth performance, prevent the occurrence of color fault. At the same time, its optical zoom lens can project different sizes of display area under the same distance, and can also be multi-angle projection, which brings more convenience to the home decoration, and the picture distortion adjustment is also very convenient.
