A QUESTION OF LIGHT

Projector and screen verses large format TV is a never ending conversation

Your choice of home cinema display will revolve around the battle between lumens and nits argues Habitech’s Craig Wheeler.

Sometime between now and some far-flung VR-driven metaverse, TV displays will begin to rival cinema’s projector/screen dream team for scale and price. But not today. Even though Samsung’s extraordinary ‘The Wall’ display and 110in micro-LED models are harbingers of things to come, they’ll blow a six-figure hole in your budget. Give it time. You don’t need the foresight of Nostradamus to appreciate that processing power and price move in opposite directions, and since TV is driving display tech, the tipping point from reflected to direct light for cinema screens may be closer than you think. In the world of display innovation, projection is always playing catchup.

Take HDR for instance. High Dynamic Range offers enhanced light output capability so that displayed images have characteristics that are more like the natural light conditions we experience in the ‘real world’. It also requires a wider, more realistic colour space, mirroring BT.2020 specifications (although there are no products currently available that can actually reproduce all BT.2020 colours). In reality, innate power over light and colour gives TV displays all the advantages when it comes to implementing life-like video fidelity.

This is because a TV display is a source of direct light, with output measured in nits. For 4K Ultra HD LED/LCD TVs, the official HDR reference standard is 1,000 nits, for an OLED TV, it’s 540 Nits. Certain high-end displays, such as ‘The Wall’ can approach 2,000 Nits, and even though the human eye is capable of processing light beyond 20,000 Nits, this is spectacular when even the brightest home

theatre projectors can manage between 150 and 200 Nits on the screen. Another truer-to-life advantage is the ability of HDR TVs to dynamically process light with greater point-to-point accuracy to reveal specular highlights unavailable in the projected image. So, when your customers return from John Lewis in love with Nit values, where does this leave your pitch for a projector and screen? On paper at least, there’s no contest. When 1 Nit is equivalent to 3.426 ANSI Lumens, you’d need a projector to output 3,426 ANSI Lumens to match a 1000 Nit TV in the same light conditions, and this is beyond the range of most home cinema projectors. But numbers are only part of the story.

THE GLORY OF IMMERSION

There is no official HDR light output standard for residential video projectors. Why? Because in a dark room, light output is not a priority. Home theatre projection creates the immersion adventure with tools available since the dawn of cinema: larger than life scale with no distractions. It has nothing to do with the real world, it’s about escaping from it.

When most movies are mastered (with HDR) to 1000, 4000, or even 10,000 nits maximum), no projector gets close. But home theatre isn’t Hi-Fi: it isn’t existentially dedicated to the bit-for-bit reproduction of reality. Rather, home theatre’s mission is to deliver dramatic impact as the director intended. Not necessarily true to life, but certainly true to drama.

That’s not to say that projector makers are blind to the advantages of HDR. For instance, the JVC NZ7 has an Auto Tone Mapping feature, which uses embedded HDR Metadata to maintain highlight detail frame by frame or scene by scene, optimising HDR performance based on 1000, 4000 and 10,000 Nit content. And further down the price range, BenQ’s HDR-PRO projectors, like the W5700, use Tone Mapping to similar effect. Whether HDR is fully realised or not, the fact remains that projection can deliver the magic of immersion at a scale beyond most TVs (save Samsung’s The Wall) and within a much wider range of budgets. What’s more, the environment needn’t be completely dark. Ambient Light-Rejecting (ALR) screens are designed for brighter rooms. Marry them with a high output projector such as BenQ’s 6000 Series short throw 4K designs, and you’ll generate a 100in image just centimetres from the screen: enough scale perhaps for the willing suspension of disbelief!

Truth is, there’s always a balance to be struck in achieving a perfect outcome for every client, and any good distributor, including Habitech, will offer you an AV line-up - with TV options - that provides all the answers according to budget and environment. And even though home theatre projection will continue to bow to the technical superiority of TV displays, it remains the one true source of cinema immersion. One day, perhaps, TV will find a way to deliver its unchallenged video fidelity at a scale and a price that rivals cinema’s projector/screen dream team. This is a distinct possibility. But not today. PROVIDINGSOLUTIONS FORCIPROFESSIONALSSINCE 2000