Just when we were thinking that Epson Powerlite Home Cinema 1080p projector was a great deal at $3000, the company comes along and stomps that down with an even better model, the EMP-TW2000. Set for a November ship date in Japan and probably later in the United States, this one trumps its predecessor with a new optical engine that not only sharpens the focus with something called OptiFocus, but also features DeepBlack juju. Sounds mysterious.
A lot of this improvement is because of the new .7-inch 1080p LCD panels Epson started cranking out in volume a couple of weeks ago, and now these chips are showing up in actual projectors introduced by Epson, Mitsubishi and Sanyo. The chip and processor combo is offering quite a bump in performance, offering 12-bit color with 68.7 billion colors, instead of the 10-bit color of before, with a mere 1.1 billion colors. Jeez, that's a lot of colors either way.
Epson says that its DeepBlack tech keeps any light from leaking through the projector's LCDs, thus raising the contrast ratio from 12,000:1 up to a more impressive 50,000:1. Yeah, right. But still, that's much better than before. Also helping things along is an automatic iris that adjusts 60 times per second. On top of all that, the company raised the projector's brightness by 30% without needing a brighter bulb, and it now cranks out a claimed 1600 lumens. That's a lot of light for a home theater.
This is going to be good. The crazy thing is, we were really impressed with the Epson Powerlite 1080, and its specs are not nearly as impressive as this latest model. Best yet, word on the street has this projector selling in the States for not much more than $3000. Wow. This will be one to watch. We'll be looking for it at CEDIA this week. [Impress]