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June 2002|Every company I've spoken to recently seems to be reading from the same script. Invariably, it reads: the next big market for little front-projectors resides squarely in the American home. I'm waiting for Martha Stewart to weigh in on the issue, but that hasn't happened yet, at least for now (maybe she's still reeling from her ill-fated association with K-Mart). In the absence of her counsel, I'll try to advise on the use of a projector in the home either for entertainment, which seems by popular demand to include DVD movies and video games as well as most other forms of video entertainment, or for home theater, which includes just about everything that home entertainment does, but with better quality. The main difference between home entertainment and home theater seems to be how much money is spent on the hardware: home entertainment is more casual and home theater is more expensive. Of course, the marketing types have lots of pyramid-shaped charts and graphs that show the high-end home theater as practiced by American billionaires residing at the tip of the pyramid's peak—lots of money spent on highly capable gear, all of which means that Bill Gates has a cool system for viewing DVDs. At the bottom of the pyramid is a broad category covering most of us American masses who have a TV set. Slightly higher up the pyramid is a category for folks who probably have a couple of TV sets and want to spend somewhere between $1500 and $7000 or so (depending upon who's slicing up the marketing pie) on another system for entertainment—and not just replace their existing TV sets. That's the category that's driving product development and marketing these days, and it's also the one we're discussing here. Bringing it All Back Home
Home entertainment really sounds like a Martha Stewart category, but it isn't, or at least not in my mind, because the color of the projector can't be easily selected to match your curtains. What the marketing types have in mind for your mind is your shelling out some bucks for a projector that you can set up (but not really install since that will shove you higher up the pyramid in categories) in various rooms or even on the patio for that big Super Bowl party and its associated video coverage, for your child's birthday or coming-of-age party and a few well-selected DVD titles, or for that all night video game-fest as practiced by a bunch of 11-year olds having a slumber party on Saturday night in your living room. Home entertainment also includes casual DVD viewing by the entire family, but not in a "Home Theater" environment, which implies a special room, "installed" equipment, and lots of high-end speakers. Home entertainment sounds a lot like this new millennium's version of the '60s slide show—and yes, this category's projected usage includes the "viewing" of digital photos through state-of-the-art consumer home theater delivery apparati (See www.emedialive.com/r7/2002/news0502-05.html). Of course, you wouldn't want to run that kind of personal slide show content through a Pro AV Home Theater system or even one that's a step down from the top "Prosumer" Home Theater either, although I suspect that Bill Gates uses his system for digital baby pictures. What I'm trying to say is don't expect too much from a "Home Entertainment" system-it's not going to be the best but it should be capable of a little more than your 27- to 36-inch standard-definition TV. Which means that even low-cost, home entertainment systems should be capable of showing HDTV images in a 16:9 aspect ratio as well as computer graphics at some reasonable resolution. The $4999 SP110 from InFocus (See review, www.emedialive.com/r14/2002/bohannon4_02.html) is targeted squarely at the previously defined "Home Entertainment" category of not too good and not too bad. Several other companies also offer projectors for this "Goldilocks" category where everything is "just right" in the middle. Not all of these projectors are DLP-based products either, so as in the business projector market, LCD and DLP can fight it out for the home market, too. I love the competition because that's what keeps both sides honest and provides for a better value, which is even more important in the home than it is with a well-financed corporate budget. The Grand Tour
Panasonic gave me a tour of their Irabaki factory during a recent trip to Japan. There I got to watch the workers build one of the first batches of Panasonic's new low-cost home entertainment projector model, the AE100. The AE100 is a three-panel LCD projector built around three of Epson's newest 0.7-inch diagonal, 16:9 aspect ratio LCDs with about 858x484 pixels in each red, green, and blue color available for your entertainment pleasure. The AE100 is capable of "true" 480-line "progressive" resolution in a 16:9 aspect ratio—which is exactly what the InFocus SP110, and the Plus Piano reviewed later in this article do. The AE100 cannot do true SVGA, 600-line resolution with a 4:3 aspect ratio computer graphics image like the Piano and the SP110 can. However, the AE100 "resizes" an SVGA image well enough to do a good job on your digital baby photos. More importantly, the Panasonic AE100 is priced at about half of what InFocus charges for the SP110. In Japan, the AE100 carries a 248,000-yen list price, which equals about $2000, depending upon the exchange rate. However, the U.S. list price has not been set at the time of this article, but I expect it to be below the Piano's $2999 price point.
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