ESSENTIAL PROJECTORS AND SCREENS
Projector and screen verses large format TV is a never ending conversation
A QUESTION OF LIGHT 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
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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
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