In last month's CEDIA Highlights post, I noted two projectors that broke through the clutter (and there was a lot of clutter: my in box has dozens and dozens of press releases). There was a third announcement that caught my eye, and, surprisingly, it, too, was projector-related.
THX is now certifying home projectors.
On the surface, this does not seem surprising - THX certifies just about everything. In fact, don't they already have a certification program for displays? It certainly seems like they did. (Actually, they did - but only as part of their commercial theater certification program.) THX is starting out with ludicrously expensive Runco models, but the program should trickle down to more affordable home projectors, rear projection televisions, and flat panel displays.
Not everyone loves THX. First of all, it's a licensing program. It costs money to get the logo, but doesn't offer anything concrete in exchange; theoretically, if your product meets all of THX's specifications, you could be THX-certifiable without actually being THX-certified and pass the savings along to your customers. A bigger issue is that THX's specifications are based on a specific philosophy. On the audio side, the philosophy includes notions of how a speaker should be constructed (small satellites, big subwoofers, and a specific crossover type and crossover frequency), how soundtracks mixed for commercial theaters should be adapted for the home environment, and how rear speakers should be integrated into a system. Reasonable people at, say, a speaker manufacturer, could disagree on an aspect of the technical approach that THX certification demands, but because the THX logo is respected in the market, they may lose business by building things their way instead of THX's methodology.
THX Certified Display testing includes the following:
- Front of Screen (FOS) Testing
- Luminance
- Contrast
- Color Gamut
- Gamma
- Uniformity
- Max Resolution
- Video Signal Processing Testing
- Scaling
- Deinterlacing
- Motion/Video Conversion
I am 100% confident that there will be controversy over THX's video specifications. I couldn't tell you what specifically will cause hand wringing - or whether it will be a specification of omission: THX's video certification program was been rightly villified several years back for certifying terrible letterbox transfers; the specs simply didn't go far enough in that case.
Still, I believe that, on balance, THX is an incredibly positive force for home theater audio and video reproduction. If you assemble a THX-approved system, even from different vendors, you know that the individual products will perform to a certain set of specifications, and that they were designed to complement each other. I also appreciate the notion of a certification program in the first place. Sure, Vendor X has a good reputation, and Vendor Y has a powerful brand. But THX drives the entire industry, for better or worse, towards a unified A/V philosophy. Aside from buying every component in your system from a single brand -- as if that were even possible (outside of Sony and Samsung) -- THX assures a level of uniformity of purpose and performance in home theater products. I like that.
-avi
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