The world of projected home cinema has seen a number of interesting collaborations this year, including JMGO partnering with Leica for optics and Xgimi teaming up with Harman Kardon for sound. Now Bowers & Wilkins has joined forces with Formovie for the T1 ultra-short-throw 4K projector.
Award-winning boutique audio brand Bowers & Wilkins has been delivering top-notch sound to our homes, heads and perhaps even our cars for decades, but this is the first time the company has built its True Sound technology into a projector.
The Formovie T1 TriColor Laser TV features two 2.75-in forward-firing glass-fiber bass/mid drivers and two 0.78-in titanium tweeters, each mounted in their own ABS and glass-fiber enclosures. The sound system is driven by a 2x15-W TI amplifier, has sound modes tuned by B&W audio engineers, and Dolby Atmos and DTS HD audio decoding.
The partnership is promising "large-scale, high-resolution, impactful sound that offers both crisp dialogue, uncolored mid-range and good bass extension, all widely projected into the room."
On the picture side of the equation, the T1 leverages Advanced Laser Phosphor Display 4.0 RGB+ technology combined with DLP imaging from Texas Instruments for a 4K UHD image at 100 diagonal inches from under 8 inches away from a wall or screen thanks to a 0.23:1 throw ratio (maximum throw size is reported to be 150 inches).
There's support for Dolby Vision, 2,800 lumens of brightness, 3,000:1 native contrast, support for HDR10+ and the BT.2020 color gamut as well, and motion compensation too. The system comes with 3 GB of DDR4 RAM and 64 GB of eMMC storage, it runs FengOS for entertainment apps, the three HDMI ports around back are joined by a couple of USB ports, Ethernet LAN, and both analog and optical audio out.
The Formovie T1 with B&W True Sound is currently being made available in China only. It's up for pre-order now for an introductory price of 16,999 yuan (~US$2,670) and can be optioned with a Fresnel screen.
Update September 1, 2022: Formovie Tech has announced the international release of the T1, under the name Formovie Theater. The projector is priced at US$3,499, and is now available in North America and Europe. Additional details revealed in the announcement include built-in motion compensation and a low latency mode for gamers, it's reported to be the only laser projector at this time to come with Android 11 TV for access to thousands of entertainment apps, content from a smartphone or laptop can be mirrored via included Chromecast, and Google Assistant is cooked in for voice control.
Product page: Formovie T1