Can UST projection hit the home cinema sweet spot?
Ultra-short-throw projector | £8495| whf.cm/Leica_Cine1
While Leica is a household name in the camera world, it’s not a brand we typically associate with AV products. However, in one of those rare, slightly mad but enjoyable moments of industry crossover, Leica has decided the time is right to apply its reputation for high-quality lenses and photographic slide projectors to the home entertainment world by delivering its first home cinema video projector.
The Cine 1 is an ultra short throw (UST) design of the sort that aims more to be a replacement for a big-screen TV than a home cinema projector. Yet its wallet-challenging price very much targets it at the uncompromising higher end of the home projection market. That £8495 is actually just a starting point; Leica sells two different models, for 100in and 120in screens, with the latter option £8995. The brand also sells its own £2200 wall-mounted ALR screen, and we certainly recommend that you partner a Cine 1 with a decent quality screen, as you don’t want to squander any of the quality delivered by its high-end lens by just literally throwing it against a wall.
No projector we have seen has looked quite like the Leica Cine 1. Its top edge features a motorised cover that slides shut to protect the lens from dust when you turn the projector off, and slides smoothly open again when you power the projector up. Seeing such a thick chunk of metal gliding to and fro so effortlessly gives the Cine 1 just the sort of instant premium thrill such an expensive projector needs. Rounded corners soften the Cine 1’s Alpha Male styling a bit, while there are adjustable feet for slightly adjusting the angle of projection.
A 4K (using double flashing ‘XPR’ technology rather than a truly native 4K array of pixel mirrors) single-chip DLP optical system is illuminated by a premium triple RGB laser lighting engine. This laser lighting contributes to a high claimed peak brightness of 3000 lumens, support for a wider range of colour than you get with regular lamp projectors (Leica claims 100 per cent coverage of the BT 2020 HDR colourscape), and a claimed dynamic contrast ratio of two million to one.
Its Leica Summicron lens comprises four aspherical lenses, manufactured to Leica’s famous standards and fixed, as noted earlier, to a specific image size.
You get three HDMI inputs rather than the typical two – two that are claimed to be 2.1 sp
