GADGETS

Marantz’s newest video projector, the VP-15S1 has been a long time in the making – six years, in fact. And while toiling away for half a decade on the development of a piece of electronic equipment might not be everyone’s idea of fun, some dedicated bods at Marantz have used their time well. Starting with the die-cast aluminium chassis of Marantz’s VP-12 series, they added the latest in custom fully-sealed 13-element all-glass optics from Konica-Minolta and added customised colour filters matched to the characteristics of the industry’s only 200 Watt DC SuperHighPressure lamp assembly. While this might be a bit of a mouthful, it all serves a purpose, helping to produce razor sharp picture – even illuminated and edge-to-edge focus, with accurate colours at 1000 ANSI lumen brightness and 10000:1 contrast ratio.
In addition to having new colour filters in the colour wheel, it now spins at 9,000 RPM, which correlates to a colour frame rate of 5x, ending nasty colour break-up. A wheel spinning that fast would be noisy, if it weren’t for the Fluid Dynamic Bearing motor, borrowed from Hard Disc Drive (HDD) technology, for silent and reliable operation.
What really helps to make this such a clever piece of kit, though, is the Gennum GF9351, a completely programmable video processor that can do calculations on the order of 500 million floating point operations per second and will take any input and de-interlace it, if necessary, and scale the output to match the exact characteristics of the panel. Very clever indeed.

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