Sony’s Mike Fasulo and Yamato (Tank) Tanikawa
AV integration remains the biggest opportunity for manufacturers, says Mike Fasulo, president and COO at Sony. During the company’s press conference Thursday at CEDIA EXPO, Fasulo said that to date, Sony sales have increased 63 percent, a direct effect from the opportunities in the custom AV market.
Stemming from this news, Sony launched three new 4K home cinema projectors during CEDIA EXPO at booth 3701, including a suggested laser projector said to deliver multiple industry firsts.
The VPL-W5000ES is promoted as the industry’s first 4K laser projector designed specifically for home theaters to deliver 5,000 lumens of color-light brightness, high dynamic range (HDR), the full DCI-P3 color space, and the ITU’s BT2020 color space to take advantage of future video sources. The laser projector is also the company’s second 4K projector to support the DCI-P3 color gamut, which is a performance feature of digital cinemas and is also delivered by Sony’s current VW1100 lamp-based projector. The 2020 standard, which delivers an even wider gamut, has also begun to appear in digital cinemas.
The laser projector and a new lamp-based 4K projector become the company’s first front projectors with HDR. They incorporate CEA’s HDR standard, which is based on the SMPTE 2084/2086 standards. The lamp-based 4K projector and a new lamp-based 4K projector also extend lamp lives to 6,000 hours, up from other Sony projectors’ 5,000 and 2,000 hours. A new lamp-based 1080p projector also boasts 6,000 hours of lamp life.
The quartet expands Sony’s home cinema projector lineup for custom installers. Sony said it is the only supplier of 4K projectors designed specifically for home theaters.
Also new is Sony’s first and only AVR with Dolby Atmos, DTS:X firmware upgradability, and HDMI 2.0a, which support HDR passthrough. The ES series ZA5000E, due in the first quarter, also passes through the BT.2020 wide-color-gamut standard for use with future wide-gamut video sources.
