At the moment LED is being touted as the future for home cinema projectors but laser may also find it's way into the home.

A new laser product has recently been released in America.

The AAXA A1 Laser Pico Projector. The AAXA has 20 Lumens which isn't much but you get perfect focus on any surface. You also get a built in media player and a 2GB thumb drive and it has it's own USB slot. The resolution is 800×600 and it throws a maximum 50 inch image. You get 90 minutes on a charge. This projector is not cheap for what is on offer with the AAXA costing $599.

On a more exciting note Sony have announced a laser projector intended for either home cinema viewing or theatrcal cinema viewing. Prices are as yet unknown but it won't be cheap.

Sony announced last week the development of a new laser light source module suitable for cinema projection consisting of three lasers for red, green and blue.

The lasers have a power output of 10W for Red, 6W for green and 5W for blue.

The developed module can be used for a range of projectors with 1000 Lumens to 10,000 Lumens. This makes it suitable for home cinema and digital theatrical cinema screenings.

Multiple modules can be stacked together which means higher brightness, lower power consumption which will be around 110 Watts at 5000 Lumens, better contrast and colours, increased life of over 10,000 hours and miniaturization of the optical prism.

The colours on laser projectors will be better than anything seen to date and focus will never be a problem again. Contrast and brightness will be perfect for home cinema standards.

Sony is expected to introduce these new projectors during the latter half of 2010.

JVC have also announced an 8K resolution 3D compatible Laser projector.

Hopefully the future of the projector is either LED or laser and i for one hope the bulb is eventually a thing of the past. The only stumbling block at the moment is the price of this new technology although it has to be said lasers have been under development for projectors for well over five years but it finally looks like products will hit the market.

Speckling is also an issue that needs to be overcome with laser projectors.

Speckling is an issue with light bouncing back onto the laser beam and this causes the speckling issues which can make it seem like there is dots on the image. It's possible in the future that LED could combine with laser and make the ultimate viewing experience but for now the technology is still in it's infancy and faces a tough battle to grab some market share.

Many of the smaller channels will have huge amounts of blocking going on in the backgrounds. In my region we are now all digital and cannot pick up terrestrial broadcasts anymore and i recall how the advertisements would originally talk about the superior image quality that digital would bring, now they concentrate on telling us how we will get more choice and more channels because they know the broadcasts are actually inferior to a well installed terrestrial analogue image.

Indeed even sound quality is worse than the old analogue broadcasts which gave us NICAM at over 750kbp/s.  Now we get digital compressed sound and usually under 128kbp/s. 

Thankfully the future of broadcasting is HD and there is now an affordable option for those who have been waiting for prices to fall.

I bought the Bush HD Freesat box around a month ago and there are some issues with it but it performs very well with high definition images.

The issues with the box are that it appears to not have a heatsink inside and it gets hot during the day so i would personally recommend it's switched off on warm days and perhaps on warm nights a small fan can blow air at the unit and make sure the air vents are never blocked.

The box sometimes loses sound when flicking through channels, it's an intermittment problem and does not happen that often but when it does i find the unit only restores sound by unplugging and plugging back in.

Standard definition images appear slightly softer when you have chosen 1080i but that's not a deal breaker since many of the SD channels look so bad anyway.

At the moment only the BBC and ITV transmit in high definition but once there is capacity on the Astra satellite Channel 4 and Channel 5 have signalled their intent to transmit free to air HD programming. I hope this will happen sometime during 2010.

BBC sports broadcasts look very good in HD and they also recently transmitted the film Becoming Jane in full widescreen 2.35:1 on their HD channel despite the fact the normal SD channel was showing the film 1.78:1.  Hopefully more films will be transmitted by the BBC in HD and in the original widescreen format rather than the usual cropped ratio that the BBC adopts for it's SD channels. In The Loop is on the BBC soon and being shown in HD.

I actually sent a complaint to the BBC recently asking that they raise their bitrate back to previous levels and that they start transmitting films in HD since they appear to not show films at all on the HD channel.  Becoming Jane was the first film i had seen transmitted on the channel since the box was bought. I hope they start transmitting a lot more.

The Bush Freesat HD box is ugly but it performs reasonably well and i think it's worth it if you want HD broadcasts now and don't want to pay Sky ridiculous money.

The Bush box has the following features below and if you already have a dish it's easy to get it going and can be bought for around £67 from Argos.

This D projector costs £17,995 pounds in the UK or $17,995 dollars in America.  The i version costs $14.995 because it does not come with the DHD Digital video processor controller. Note how we pay more for such technology in the UK.

LED stands for light emitting diode and is being used more and more for lighting purposes.

The build quality looks superb but the projector is large weighing in at 22.4KG.

A spokesperson for Runco says the size could shrink by 25% but for now the size helps with heat dissipation and noise control as this is a very quiet projector.

Brightness for this new projector is rated at 800 Ansi Lumens.  When calibrated to home theater standards you will get around 450 lumens which is good enough in a light controlled room for a screen size of around 120 inches and this should get you around 13 foot lamberts of light output on a 1.3 gain screen after professional calibration. 

These LED projectors are capable of achieving perfect colour to meet the REC 709 Blu Ray standard. Indeed the colour is where LED really shines as we will be able to get as close to perfection as possible after careful calibration and an ISF professional calibration is recommended.

There are cheaper bulb based projectors out there that will achieve over 600 real world lumens output with a new bulb but within 200 hours the bulb dims and they achieve much less. The LED Runco projectors do not lose light output and thus are perfect for those who have a light controlled room and a screen size of up to 120 inches.

For those with 2.35:1 screens you can buy an optional anamorphic lens and maximise the quality from scope movies. Partner with an Oppo Blu Ray player and subtitles can be easily moved to anywhere on the screen thus it's the perfect scope set up for those who can afford it.

This projector is not really in the affordable range just yet but for those who have the money and want the convenience that LED brings then it's a sound investment and it's likely that within the next five years the technology should drop in price and lamps will become a thing of the past.