LAS VEGAS - Hisense has a new projector to show off, and just rattling off the main features should make you take notice: 4K picture, HDR, Harman Kardon sound. Oh, and triple lasers.
Is it too late to make Austin Powers jokes? Because the new Hisense 100L7T has frickin' lasers, with a three-laser RGB system that's probably more awesome than any of Dr. Evil's sharks would've been.
When it comes to big screens, 4K TVs have gotten less expensive, but anything approaching the Laser TV's 100 inches will still cost you a lot of money, into the tens of thousands of dollars. But a good projector can handle larger sizes with ease, and the Hisense 100L7T can project onto a screen 120-inches in size, and does so from only 7 inches away.
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The housing for that short throw projector isn't small (it will dwarf your Blu-ray player or game console, for example) but it's small enough to set on a TV stand or low table. That makes it compact enough that you can fill a wall with 4K HDR picture without having to hang something from the ceiling, or even use more floor space than most other TVs would take up.
But size isn't everything. The Hisense 100L7T Laser TV really stands out, thanks to its three-laser projector system, which Hisense is calling Tri-Chroma. That's a fancy name for the combined red, green and blue laser system the projector uses to create true-to-life, super bright colors. And because it can do this without ever passing through a color wheel filter, the brightness is undiluted, with the projector capable of putting up 3,500 nits of brightness on the screen.
The result isn't just a lot of colors, the projector can produce pretty much all the colors, including pure white. Watching high resolution nature scenes, I was able to make out lush colors in a forest of autumn leaves, and a scene of wintery ice and snow maintained its clarity of detail without washing out the white highlights. It even supports HDR10 for high dynamic range content.
The included projection screen not only makes the projected image look great, it also keeps the other light in the room from washing out the picture, thanks to an ambient-light rejecting surface.
In technical terms, the pre-production unit Hisense is showing can produce 96.6 percent of the rec.2020 color space, and product engineers hope to get closer to 100 percent before the projector goes on sale.
It's also a full-fledged smart TV, running Hisense’s VIDAA OS, with support for apps like Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video. It will work with Amazon Alexa for voice control, and it comes with a 110-watt Harman Kardon sound system built in, complete with a separate subwoofer.
