Up Close With Meridian’s $185,000 4096x2160 Pixel Projector -- 10 Megapixel Cinema Blows Us Away

Posted 07/30/2008 at 5:00am | by Gordon Mah Ung

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Think a 30-inch monitor at 2560x1600 resolution is amazing? Then you haven’t seen Merdian’s 810 Reference Video System that gives you a 4096 x 2160projected image for the low price of $185,000.

We got to touch and see the 810 up close and personal last week in a private demonstration held at Dolby Laboratories headquarters. Why Dolby? The company has a famous 90-seat theater in its main building in San Francisco that’s actually nicer than most small screens at the multiplex.

Using various 1080i, 1080p and Internet video source materials, Meridan showed off just what the 810 Reference Video was capable with using today’s materials. The company decided against showing native 4K x 2K material because it didn’t want to raise people’s expectations since you really can’t get source material at that resolution yet.

Instead, Meridian said the demonstration was also designed to show off Marvell’s Qdeo video scaler. To our eyes, the Qdeo did a truly impressive job rendering the 1080i broadcast and 1080p Blu-Ray material on the 45-foot screen.  To our eyes, at least, it was indistinguishable from, well, film. More impressive was the projection a 1080p trailer of Speed Racer downloaded from the Internet. Compression artifacts were certainly more prevalent but to watch an Internet clip projected on an 18 foot by 10 foot screen blew us away.

So how does this apply to the PC? Today, it doesn’t as it takes a quad DVI input to drive the 810 but Meridian has said that companies such as Nvidia are already interested in adding support for it. It’s actually a pretty easy tweak and not that far off from what the military is using some high-end graphics cards and PCs for.

Right now, it’s a toy for Steven Spielberg or Bill Gates, but in a few years, 4K x 2K for movie viewing or gaming may be a reality.