Back in 2021, China's JMGO launched a successful Kickstarter for a 4K tri-color Laser TV. Now the company is returning with a more compact plug-and-play laser projector called the N1 Ultra that's built around a tri-color laser engine for the promise of "bright and true-to-life" UHD visuals.
The N1 Ultra DLP projector features an in-house Microstructure Adaptive Laser Control engine with a triple-color laser light source that puts out 4,000 ANSI lumens for daytime watching potential and is reckoned good for up to 30,000 hours of use. JMGO says that this translates to 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) image resolution at up to 150 diagonal inches with a 10-bit color depth. There's support for 110% of the BT.2020 color gamut and HDR10, contrast shapes up as 1,600:1, and there's digital zoom too.
Something called Modular Laser Stacking is reported to allow for "enhanced optical efficiency, smaller size, and improved heat dissipation performance," while a diffuser setup and speckle reduction technology make for uniform brightness with significantly reduced laser speckles.
The system's processing brains come courtesy of a MediaTek MT9629 system-on-chip supported by 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi 6 are onboard, Android TV 11 grants access to thousands of entertainment apps, Chromecast is cooked in to cater for screen sharing from a mobile device, and there are two HDMI 2.1 ports for cabling up media sources like Blu-ray players, streaming devices and games consoles.
The N1 Ultra also rocks a built-in sound system developed with Dynaudio that features a pair of Dolby-certified 10-W speakers that are also capable of DTS decoding. Plus there's a headphone jack for private movie nights in a shared household. Though quite portable at 9.49 x 7.99 x 9.29 in (24 x 20.2 x 23.5 cm) and 9.92 lb (4.5 kg), users will still need to set the boxy projector down near a wall outlet as it doesn't have an internal battery.
It stands on an integrated dual-axis gimbal, which "allows for stepless adjustment up to 135° vertical and 360° horizontal" for setup flexibility. And it sports 3D ToF sensors plus CMOS cameras that work with image recognition algorithms to automatically adjust the thrown image, adapt the output brightness to ambient light, fit the image to a projector screen and work around obstacles such as light switches.
The N1 Ultra is currently raising production funds on Kickstarter, where pledges start at just US$1,099 if you're quick but $1,169 if you miss the launch window. The usual crowdfunding cautions apply, but if all goes to plan with the already funded campaign, shipping is estimated to start in May. Once available for general sale, the suggested retail price is expected to run to $2,299.
Source: JMGO