News

RGB Communications and Projectiondesign show new Action! Model One Home Cinema Projector at CEDIA EXPO 2004 (1/6/2004)

RGB Communications will be showing the Action! Model one mk II, the very latest addition to the award winning Action! Series of high performance home cinema projectors from Norwegian manufacturer projectiondesign on their stand F6 at CEDIA EXPO 2004.

This latest upgrade of the award-winning Model One includes a new 7-segment, 5x colour wheel, Faroudja' video processing, pure glass optics and HD2+ DLP' technology from Texas Instruments. This unique package delivers an immense 3000:1 contrast ratio, continuously adjustable brightness to fit any screen size together with very low operating noise levels. This leap in performance is not matched by a rise in price as the Action! Model One SRP and trade prices will remain unaltered.

The upgrade from the original model one includes the 7 segment colour wheel, often referred to as a NDG (Neutral Density Green) colour wheel, as the 7th segment is a small green segment with a neutral density grey filter applied. In total this increases the amount of green area on the wheel itself, as a result of which the projector has more time to load and unload the data for whatever part of the image is green (in effect all colours except pure red or pure blue). As green is such a substantial part of visible light (about 59% of the energy in white light), the new colour wheel generates more detailed and continuous green and grey scales. Hence, green colour resolution is increased to full 10-bit, whereas the other colours remain unchanged (8-bit). Image quality wise, these enhancements result in a far better image than has been possible up until now.

The NDG colour wheel also helps eliminate noise. DLP' technology uses an effect called "temporal dithering" in order to create the deepest grey levels. This can be seen as a variation of colours' intensities over time to create levels in between the available colour resolution. When looking closely, one might see this effect as "noise" in the image primarily in the green channel. This artefact is as good as eliminated, and the result for the viewer is a more easy on the eye, liquid and steady image, with greatly reduced low level detail. In total a much more film like image.

Newly designed fixed lens aperture ("IRIS") - the new aperture further increases contrast. By closing down the lens from F/2.8 (already very high contrast aperture compared to many projectors) to approximately F/4.0, contrast can be increased up to 70% from previous versions, and at the same time, absolute brightness decreases with about 20%. Collectively this gives a much better black level - very important in any home theatre setting.

In addition the new optical elements increase the flexibility with screen sizes and environments, and paired with the adjustable black level and contrast enhancement features, optimises the Action! model one mk II for a wider gamut of theatres. Increased contrast also makes the image dramatically more dynamic than with previous versions. Using a fixed lens aperture, available optical contrast is available whatever the lamp, system and lens setting, and is not like with many other projectors trading one for the other.

Newly designed electronics - the main image processing board has been updated to implement new noise reduction and de-interlacing features. The model one mk II continues to harness DCDi' processing by Faroudja, ensuring state of the art de-interlacing and video processing for every video format input.

The new Action! model one mk II will be available in the UK from June 2004 onwards when an upgrade scheme from the mk I to mk II will also be introduced.

www.rgbcomms.co.uk