Fujifilm first revealed a novel ultra-short-throw projector rocking a nifty rotating lens back in 2018, before officially launching it as the FP-Z5000 in 2019. A brighter model followed in 2021, and now the company has slotted another unit in the middle of its Z-series lineup.
The Z-series family members are designed for setup in venues where space constraints might prevent other more-conventional projectors from being deployed.
To achieve this feat, Fujifilm leveraged its optics know-how to develop what it calls a two-axial rotatable lens, which is made up of large-diameter spherical and aspherical elements to minimize image distortion and aberrations.
The lens unit features a projection arm that can rotate by 90 degrees and a lens unit that rotates 360 degrees, allowing for "omnidirectional image projection without moving the main projector unit."
The new 18 x 20 x 6.4-in (460 x 510 x 162.5-mm) Z6000 can throw 100-diagonal-inch images from about 30 inches away, so it's really more of a short-throw projector than a UST. It has a lens-shift range of 70 percent vertically and 35 percent horizontally, which means that the visuals can be moved from landscape to portrait orientation "without having to change the location of the main unit or direction of the lens." And it also comes with 1.1x optical zoom for further adjustment of the projected images.
The first member of the Z-series family, the Full HD Z5000, puts out 5,000 lumens, the 1,920 x 1,200-resolution Z8000 bumps that up to 8,000 lumens so, you guessed it, the laser light source at the heart of the Z6000 manages a brightness output of 6,000 lumens. Fujifilm makes no mention of display resolution for the new DLP projector.
No pricing or availability information has been revealed as yet either, though given the US$12k price tag of the Z5000 and the $20k+ cost of the Z8000, you can probably expect the new model to sit somewhere inbetween.
Source: Fujifilm