Credit: Epson
Epson launched its most advanced home theatre laser projector to date at Epson's Australian HQ in Sydney last week, introducing a 4K device that looks ideal for theatre buffs that want to do a bit of big screen gaming on the side.
Powering the new 4K EH-LS12000B 4K PRO-UHD projector is a 32-bit Epson Picture chip that handles the real-time colour, contrast, HDR and frame interpolation. Epson says the chip is the most advanced it has ever made and that it faithfully reproduces source material as it's intended to be seen.
The new 4K EH-LS12000B also features a new laser array light source that provides 2,700 lumens of brightness and up to 20,000 hours of maintenance-free operation.
The projector comes stacked with high-end technologies for colour and contrast. For accurate colour reproduction, it uses an Epson True 3-chip 3LCD projector engine. This technology uses three individual LCD chips to continuously display 100 percent of the RGB colour signal for every frame. Images are reproduced in full HDR, HDR10+ and HLG (Hybrid Log Gamma) colour.
Credit: Epson For crispness in each frame, the EH-LS12000B uses next-generation image enhancement and processing algorisms and advanced pixel-shifting technology. Pixel-shifting works in parallel with the three high-definition LCD chips to upscale images from low resolution to 4K images with 8.3 million pixels.
Epson played a number of clips at the Sydney launch event to demonstrate the projector's capabilities. These included one clip from King Kong in which I was asked to observe details in the subjects. In the first clip the images appeared quite crisp allowing me to observe details such as the hair hanging over a little girl's ears and the small wrinkles on King Kong's neck.
In a second clip - a night-time battle scene between King Kong and Godzilla - I was asked to focus on how well the projector reproduced the colourful lights in the fictionalised Tokyo cityscape. In this scene the bright lights appeared rich and vibrant.
Although not a specialist gaming projector, the new projector also appears to be suitable for causal 4K gaming. It features a 120 frames per second refresh rate and faster than 20ms input lag time, which should ensure gameplay is acceptably smooth.
In Australia, the Epson EH-LS12000B 4K PRO-UHD laser projector has an RRP of A$8,999 and is available from authorised Epson resellers.
