Marantz is best known for its quality audio equipment but the company has been carving out a solid niche in the performance end of the projector market. It’s latest offering, the high definition (HD) VP-11S1 is the best yet, with an £11,000 price tag to match.

Offering full-HD resolution of 1080p, Marantz likes to boast that this one breaks the ‘digital cinema barrier’ but that’s marketing for you. The specs are very impressive but, as always with projectors, it’s best to rely on what you see on the screen than what you read on the page. It has a native resolution of  1920 x 1080, making it capable of handling all levels of HD content and a high contrast ration of 6500:1. It’s powered by the first 1080p DLP chip from Texas Instruments and according to Marantz this means:

Texas Instruments' first true 1080p HD chip, which more than doubles the pixel count of previous 720p chips to over 2 million pixels. Furthermore, the super-reflective micromirrors of the new DLP chip are smaller, making the total area only approximately 1.4 times as large as a 720p chip. In addition, the chip is now controlled by dual drivers, Texas Instruments’ newly developed DDP3021. Used in parallel, the drivers provide precise control over the more numerous mirrors and enable 12-bit gamma processing, resulting in the expression of image gradations that are four times richer. This allows the VP-11S1 to display an astounding 68-plus billion colors on screen. Further enhancing image quality is the use of the specially designed 10-bit image processing chip with Visual Excellence Processing (VSP) from Gennum Corporation.

If you have £11,000 to spare and a yen for Marantz kit then this is for you, although it's not the prettiest beast. Just remember you can now get 720p HD projectors for under £1,500 and rival 1080p projects for around £5,000.

  technology hd High definition home cinema home entertainment DLP