Sony Introduces New LaserLite Projectors and Vision Exchange

Sony today announced two new LaserLite projectors, as well as Vision Exchange, a collaboration solution aimed at corporate and education users.

Sony’s Vision Exchange is a new intuitive collaboration solution for education and corporate users.

Flexible and cost effective, Vision Exchange brings together students, lecturers and presenters in a dynamic workgroup-based environment that encourages creative discussion and knowledge exchange.

Ideal for higher education and corporate conference rooms, Vision Exchange provides a solution to suit a range of teaching spaces and meeting areas. Teams can brainstorm and work collaboratively, wirelessly sharing content from everyone’s laptop or tablet. It is just as easy to bring in participants to join the discussion by adding a video connection to remote locations, making teamwork truly global.

Active Learning and Interactive Lecture Classroom
Traditional “one-way” lectures are being steadily replaced with interactive methods that encourage deeper student engagement and understanding in today’s BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) environments, reflecting a major shift from passive to active learning.

Corporate Conference Room

Available via simple license option, a Remote Communication option lets workgroups connect with other sites using standards-based videoconference systems. Participants can share content from their own devices (laptops, tablets and smartphones), and annotations overlaid on images or whiteboard descriptions in real-time.

Today, most meeting rooms are based around a cabled single content source and a single display, plus a dedicated AV system with switchers, video conferencing systems and other hardware. This complex set-up is frequently a cause of wasted time and frustration, as presenters struggle with awkward wiring instead of focusing on the meeting itself. Vision Exchange eliminates these operational headaches, allowing participants to focus on the meeting with improved communication.

Sony is expanding its range of laser light source (Z-Phosphor) projectors by introducing two new LaserLite™ models aimed at making laser technology more cost-effective for the installation market. Designed for commercial applications, including classrooms and meeting rooms, the new VPL-PHZ10 (WUXGA) and VPL-PWZ10 (WXGA) projectors bring the benefits of laser technology — image quality, color reproduction and virtually zero-maintenance — to customers who previously may have only been able to experience lamp-based projection.
The new fixed wide zoom lens models provide users with a lower-cost, high-quality option for installing laser projections in rooms traditionally geared toward lamp-based technology. The new projectors’ light source have a total constant brightness of 4500 lumens for up to 12,000 hours depending on usage environment, enabling users to experience the projectors’ original level of image quality over 5 years in standard use, while achieving a maximum 5,000 lm brightness when the constant brightness mode is off.

With these two new introductions, Sony’s laser-based professional projector family now grows to a total of 11 models, with lumen levels starting at 2,000 and resolutions ranging from WXGA, WUXGA up to 4K.

“Projector users need options, since every room is different with varying installation and environmental challenges,” says Yoshi Koike, marketing manager for business projectors at Sony Electronics. “With these two new models, users now have the option of converting to laser throughout a facility, where in the past, a mix of laser and lamp models made more sense due to budget constraints.”

The new projectors inherit many popular and convenient features from Sony’s existing laser models such as BrightEra 3LCD panel technology, which reproduces red, green and blue components of an image separately to ensure natural-looking and vivid colors.

The new models are designed to deliver enhanced picture quality with features such as “Reality Creation,” a technology already in use by Sony’s home theater projection systems for high-end consumer entertainment. The Reality Creation engine analyzes and processes every input signal to refine detail, clarity and sharpness for naturally up-scaled images. This provides higher-resolution perspective, even in the lower-resolution WXGA series. The Contrast Enhancer feature expands the perceived dynamic range of the signal by refining light and dark areas of the image in real-time.

Sony’s laser light source means there’s no lamp that needs to slowly warm up or cool down, no lamp to limit tilt angle and no trade-off between high brightness and high resolution. The laser projectors are designed for up to 20,000 hours of maintenance-free operation, depending on the usage environment, which contributes to reducing users’ total cost of ownership.

In addition to the laser light source design, the projectors are designed for energy efficiency due to their 3LCD engine. The new models’ low power consumption also reduces heat dissipation, in turn lowering fan noise.

Each projector has a compact blend-in slim design, with a weight of 19 lbs (8.7 kg), and each measures 20”x 4.4” x 14” (WxHxD), making them about 50% smaller and 30 % lighter than the Sony’s existing FHZ/FWZ laser models.

The new models have a wider lens shift range even with their compact body, which can help in challenging installation environments, for example maintaining audiences’ site lines by installing the projector above a screen.

The new models are also equipped with built-in HDBaseTTM interfaces, enabling easier connectivity and reducing total system costs by using a single cable which runs all the video, audio, control and IP signal up to 328 feet (100m).