Projectiondesign M20: Add 200 trillion colors to your life
There are pros and cons to video projectors. On the one hand, films can look stunning when blown up to the size of a wall. On the other hand, Deal or No Deal is unlikely to benefit from being expanded to such epic proportions. With high-definition content becoming more common though, there is an increasing amount of stuff just begging to be projected on to a huge screen.
(Credit:
Crave UK)
The Projectiondesign M20 promises high-end performance, but it doesn't come cheap at 3,500 pounds (about $6,935). The price seems particularly steep when you consider this is only a 720p projector. The good news is that the M20 is nice and quiet, registering at -24db. It also claims to produce 200 trillion color shades. Now, call us skeptical, but we couldn't name 20 actual colors. Even allowing for all the shades of pink in the spectrum, we aren't sure how 200 trillion shades are possible.
The connectivity is fairly basic, offering DVI, component, S-Video and composite inputs. There is no HDMI on this projector, so instead you'll have to get an HDMI-to-DVI adaptor if you want to hook up your PlayStation 3 or HD DVD player. In practice, this isn't likely to cause many problems because it still supports HDCP, so copy-protected content will still be playable.
The M20 also has a 7x color wheel, which might sound like the sort of thing you'd find on a hippie's Christmas list, but is in fact quite an important feature. All DLP projectors have a colour wheel, which rotates very quickly in order to produce the image you see projected. The problem with color wheels is they can produce an ugly rainbow effect, which can be very distracting. The M20 claims that the 7x color wheel cuts down on these artefacts and produces a much smoother image.
The projector itself is available in several colors, including British racing green, which we think is a particularly strange one to produce electrical equipment in. Clearly someone at Projectiondesign likes cars though, because you can also get it in Vanquish gray and Maranello blue.
(Source: Crave UK)
Going by that formula, 48 is the smallest integer (whole number) power of 2 that will give at least 200 million. To be precise, 2^48=281 trillions (or 281,474,976,710,656). So, 48 bits per pixel.
I can't see how any digital media format that uses lossy video compression (e.g. DVDs, BD, HD-DVD, etc.) can store this much of information since they usually cut out things that the human eye can't see easily.
This is not a problem with analog video signals coming from analog media provided that there are no bottlenecks any where in the path.