A MATURING MARKET

Marketing and Communications Manager at Habitech, Sophie Graham, examines some of the key questions in the projectors and screens category.

Home cinema is on a roll, but how is the market changing?

No doubt the pandemic has boosted spending on homes and property, accelerating the demand for home cinema, which is great for the industry and distis with mature, high performance product ranges and support infrastructure. With so much time and money to spare - and nowhere to go - consumers across the board are prioritising home entertainment. We’ve seen demand for streaming services soar on all screens: mobile and fixed, so AV has never had it so good. This means that dedicated home cinema environments have become an essential feature of high-end properties while the desire for flexible media room spaces is pulling in new money. And greater visibility on social media is spreading the word, or more accurately, the image of the home as the centre of leisure and entertainment, rather than somewhere to stay outside working hours. For instance, folks are discovering - and liking - the media room idea on their mobile devices, or they’re appreciating how outdoor AV can transform the potential of garden spaces, so online marketing is the place to plant new ideas.

Where is the demand, dedicated spaces? Multi-use living room spaces?

Now that a new life/work balance has taken hold, and visibility is up, I’m expecting demand to grow across the CI universe. Our dealers are as busy designing high-speed networks to facilitate home working and higher quality streaming as they are installing the hardware to deliver the data. If the experience of our new demonstration rooms in Basingstoke is anything to go by, there are new customers for everything we do. It all depends on what they want and how big the budget, but the tiered good/better/best experiences can really shift preferences upwards. Every time, it seems, there’s an epiphany - which settles the issue. It could be a realisation that a multi-use media room format would be perfect for the space available and family circumstances, or the visualisation of how to transform an underutilised room into a designed cinema living space. Then again if the client has the cash, the flagship cinema experience might loosen the purse strings. It’s a case of horses for courses and obviously there will be more demand for the lower budget solutions in the population at large, but in our experience the split isn’t clear cut. If there is a rule, it’s to get as many people as possible sitting comfortably in front of the screen, because the cinematic experience always motivates a willingness to spend.

JVC has released the new Procision Series DLA-NZ9, DLA-NZ8, and DLA-NZ7, and the Reference Series DLA-RS4100, DLA-RS3100, and the DLA-RS2100

How has technology advanced in recent times to cope with the more flexible demands the market is asking for?

First comes the network. If you can realise the advances in data speed available, you’re on to a winner. Then comes the question of what you do with it. We’re starting to see Dante’s network-based audio matrixing being used to allow complex 32-channel cinema systems to be managed entirely on CAT cable: imagine the joy of avoiding the necessity to get 32 XLR cables back to the rack. We’re also seeing a huge step-up in video quality and practicality from MicroLED technology, as well as speaker designs to accommodate the new ‘shape of LCR’. Wisdom Audio, for instance, has created a horizontal line source speaker to allow a centre channel to be mounted close to the ground below large displays.

Specifically in projectors and screens what are some of the outstanding technical advancements of recent times?

The advent of laser technology has increased longevity in projection, doing away with the inevitable lamp change after 3000 hours. Laser also allows for much higher quality projection at more accessible price points. And of course, you can’t beat the quality of all-glass optics. Then there’s the quality of the screen. The newest designs from Projecta for instance have a microscopically finer projection surface to ensure the more accurate reflection of higher 4K pixel counts (and more captivating results).

What do you consider the most important performance characteristics that each component must offer currently?

For us, colour accuracy is a priority when it comes to projection. JVC has always offered calibration to the DCI P3 standard, and in this respect - as well as its glorious abilities with HDR and contrast - JVC is market leading. It’s undeniable that vibrant natural colours and

darkest blacks, as well as the smoothest motion processing, help customers to believe that the action is real and - along with perfectly calibrated sound - contribute to achieving the objective for all system designers: full cinematic immersion!

What are some of the best executions of screen and projector installs you have seen of late?

The rising tide of quality and performance in system design reaches new highs seemingly every week. We’re continually bowled over by the ingenuity invested by our dealers in creating entire cinema environments dedicated to the

film maker’s art. Just as George Lucas once developed THX AV standards for movie theatres to move performance closer to the ideal, I believe that it’s down to today’s designers to emulate that ambition. In video this means the use of

anamorphic lenses for full screen ultrawide ratios, as well as high contrast projectors and finer projection surfaces. In this way the image and the sound envelop the audience just as the studio intended, and when this happens, we all get what we want: the happiest customers!