Leica has announced the fruit of a partnership with Chinese home entertainment hardware company JMGO, the O1 Pro ultra-short-throw LED projector, which can fill a wall with Full HD images from just inches away.
The project began in 2020, with Leica reporting that the two companies engaged in a 12-month period of "intensive collaboration in research and development," with the JMGO O1 Pro emerging as the result.
It's a stylish image thrower, with sharp edges given over to smooth curves. Rather than having to place the unit a good distance away from the wall or screen, the O1 Pro can project 100 diagonal inches from just over 8 inches away, at a throw ratio of 0.21:1. The image resolution is 1,920 x 1,080p, though 4K input is supported, and if Leica puts its name to something, it's a pretty safe bet that the optics are going to impress.
Other details are scant at this stage, but we do know that JMGO has tapped Dynaudio for the built-in dual speakers, Dolby Audio is also onboard, along with DTS. It runs on JMGO's Luna OS with Amazon Alexa cooked in for voice control, and comes with Bluetooth and HDMI connectivity.
"Home cinema entertainment is an exciting market and projection is not an unknown environment for Leica," said Leica CEO, Matthias Harsch. "We bring to the collaboration not only our expertise in optics and quality, but also many years of experience in the development of projectors. With JMGO, we have the ideal and strong partner at our side to develop this new business area successfully. We are looking forward to the joint development of high-quality and high-performance products that will offer customers professional imaging quality in their own homes."
The first O1 Series projector has already launched in China, with JMGO aiming to open the international order books from June – and an Indiegogo campaign is being prepped for that very purpose.
As well as the O1 Pro, the funding campaign will also include the Smart Wall O1 projector. This model offers a 0.25:1 throw ratio for 100-diagonal-inch images at 9.8 in from the wall, also at Full HD quality with support for HLG and HDR10 standards. Brightness is reported to be 800 ANSI lumens.
Elsewhere, it has MediaTek MT9669 processing brains, comes with 3 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage, and features two USB ports and two HDMI inputs, and well as SPDIF audio.
There's currently no word on pricing, but we'll know more when the Indiegogo launches.
Source: Leica
