Last week I took a walk over to Sanyo’s recent product showcase at the Omni Berkshire Hotel in New York to see what the projector company had to offer in its fall lineup. What I found was that the company had been making leaps and bounds in technology since I had last taken in a Sanyo press conference.
The new thing that had all the Sanyo reps abuzz was its new QuaDrive projector technology. Before I even knew what it was, I noticed two similar sized projectors set up side by side, the one on the right was definitely showing brighter, more vivid colors than the other, but what could be causing such a drastic change in only color?
Tommy Kashima, VP, product planning, Sanyo Presentation Technologies came up to me at once and began explaining the magic of its QuaDrive technology. “Sanyo’s unique QuaDrive optical engine makes a noticeable difference in shades of color that contain yellow and range from green to red.” But how does it work? To quote Sanyo’s new Whitepaper on the technology, “Sanyo’s QuaDrive system starts with a conventional 3LCD optical engine (lamp, light integrators, three dichroic filters, three LCD panels, and a combining prism) and adds a fourth, single pixel LCD panel to filter and pass yellow spectral energy as needed. It’s just that simple. And here’s where the fourth LCD panel comes into the picture. It’s positioned ahead of the green LCD panel in the light path. This fourth panel is not the same as the other panels, however. It is a simple, single-pixel light shutter with an aperture the same size as its matching green panel.”
So to make it even simpler, Sanyo added yellow to the usual RGB spectrum of projectors, making images even more life-like. The difference was truly astounding, when compared to a similar sized projector with the same lumens. The clarity of the strawberries on the screen made me hungry enough to snag a couple of sliced ones on the refreshments table on my way back to the hotel lobby.
So where does Sanyo see this technology going? Well into all of its newest projectors from now on, of course. Right now the only projector with this technology is the PCL-XP200L. Sanyo, a company that’s always sort of stayed in the high-end projector market, also unleashed a slew of home theater projectors that could be very comfortable in the education market.
And speaking of the education market, Sanyo also released a new ultra short throw projector, the PLC-XL51. This projector can be hung or sat on the floor, or set against glass. Its flexibility is perfect for the classroom, but it could also be at home in a Digital Signage application. It’s great to see Sanyo branching out into more applications, including exploring new technologies. The fact that there are still companies developing their own solutions to problems instead of copying each other and then labeling a solution with a different name is somewhat comforting.
