Epson the market leader in the projector market is set to go after the home market with a powerful new 1080p projector that can also be switched to run at 24FPS. In the Australian market, Epson is #1 followed by NEC, BenQ and Acer however there is contention over claims from an unknown research company used by Epson that the Australian is set to grow three fold over the next 3 years.
During the last 6 months Epson has grown their home projector market share by 19% however information presented by Epson from relatively unknown UK research group Decision Tree claims that the market for projectors in Australia was set to grow from 19,000 units in 2007 to 60,000 units in 2010, however this is disputed by local research group GfK which claims that the projector market has declined this year by 32% in both units and volume. Epson also dispute the UK research groups findings.
A big contributor to the decline in the home projector market is the growth in demand for large flat screen TVs. Another contributing factor to the move away from projectors claims GfK, is the high cost of projector lamps which in the case of Epson's new projector is set to cost a user between $5,000 and $8,000* on top of the $7,800 purchase price for the new TW2000. This is based on a lamp costing around $450 and having a life of between 2 & 3,000 hours. (30,000 hours which is half the life of a plasma screen will cost a consumer $4,500). However most projectors are only used for 12 to 14 hours a week or 624 hours a year.
