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Originally posted by: ricarleite
I bet these projectors are the best money can buy... Do they provide a better image than a hi-res TV set?
The best digital projectors on the market are 3-chip DLPs and LCOS models. They're in the $20K to $30K range. The 12S4 is a 1-chip DLP.
Without getting into too much detail, 3-chip DLPs have a DMD chip for each of the primary colors (red/green/blue). A 1-chip DLP has one DMD and a color wheel with colored segments. The wheel spins very fast in front of the chip and fools the eye into thinking it's seeing a full-color image, when in fact it's seeing a series of red/green/blue images at a very high frequency. 1-chip DLPs are cheaper to produce, but there are image quality compromises due to the single chip design.
The technology in these projectors is the same stuff used in DLP-based projection TVs. The image quality should theoretically be the same, but a lot of it comes down to image processing, which each manufacturer implements differently. Some are definitely better than others.
There's no technical reason for a projector to cost more than a projection TV. In fact, a projector should be cheaper because it requires fewer materials and costs much less to ship from the country of origin. It's the status of front projection that keeps the prices high.