As the sole manufacturer of the LCD panels found in Mitsubishi’s and Panasonic’s inexpensive 1080p projectors, it seems only natural that Epson would come out with a projector of its own. The PowerLite Pro Cinema 1080 was first mentioned at CEDIA in September, but it was only on static display at that time. At CES, it was producing beautiful pictures in Epson’s demo room at the Wynn hotel.

The projector utilizes a high-quality Fujinon lens with an extra-wide throw range of 10 to 22 feet on a 100-inch screen. The lamp is a proprietary design dubbed E-TORL (Epson Twin Optimized Reflective Lamp), which includes two mirrors to increase efficiency by 20 to 30 percent over conventional lamps. The video processor is from Pixelworks, and the dynamic contrast ratio is said to be 12,000:1 thanks to what Epson calls Absolute Black. Finally, this is the world’s first projector to implement HDMI 1.3.
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