Now They're More Handy for HD Playback, Along With 4K Viewing

The rallying cry at Sony might be “To HD … and beyond!” as the company announces its new “T-series” of SXRD 4K projectors. The main selling point of the new SRX-T110 ($102,000) and SRX-T105 ($78,000) projectors is their maximum resolution of 4096×2160, but they have lots of features that may make them appropriate even for HD post environments that don’t expect to see 4K images anytime in the near future.
For one thing, the included LKRI-005 HDCP DVI Board allows connection of an HDMI source like a Blu-ray Player – or Sony’s flagship media player, the Blu-ray-friendly PlayStation 3 – via DVI input. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it requires compliance with the HDCP copy-protection specification for 1080p and 720p HD content, which is new in this generation of SXRD projectors. The DVI connection also supports full 2K (2048x1080p/24, /48 and /60) input without HDCP.

The T110 and T105 have a total of four slots for input signal boards; if you want to project 4K images at their full 4096×2160 resolution, you’ll have to yank out the LKRI-005 and install four LKRI-003 Dual-link HD-SDI Input Boards.

Sony officials stress that the SXRD projectors also do a fine job with HD and 2K images, and in multi-screen mode a 4K projector can display as many as four full-resolution 2K images on a single screen. In New York last week, Sony demonstrated the projector by displaying a 4K Windows Vista desktop at full resolution without stuttering or dropped frames via Nvidia’s new Quadro Plex D2 “visual computing system” (starting at $10,750), which was introduced at SIGGRAPH in August. The moral of the story might be that 4K images aren’t cheap, but they sure are pretty.

Just as time marches on, the quality specs of the SXRD series have been improved by Sony engineers, with a refined optical block design offering what officials described as a “modest” increase in brightness (to 11,000 lumens for the T110 and 5,500 lumens for the T105) and a “significant” increase in contrast (now rated at 2,500:1) thanks to new optical coatings in the projectors’ T-shaped prisms.

Finally, Sony was showcasing the T110 and T105 in anticipation of next month’s Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in Orlando, FL, and the projectors have a host of features keyed to the high-end simulation market, including the ability to mount the new projectors fully perpendicular to the floor or ceiling, instead of at only a 45-degree angle (which required the use of mirrors to project the image overhead or beneath your feet). Also new is 95 percent coverage of the Adobe RGB color gamut, and more granular gamma settings – values between 1.8 and 2.59 are selectable in steps of 0.01.

For more information: www.sony.com/sxrd