With both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs delivering their first movies in 1080i/p, serious AV enthusiasts – like ourselves! – are being drawn ever more towards display devices with native pixel counts of 1920 x 1080. So it's fair to say that we were seriously excited by the arrival of the Action Model Three 1080: the second 1080p DLP projector to arrive at the doors of SmartHouse, following the SIM2 HT3000 (See our review of the HT3000 here).
It's actually a surprise SIM2 hit our pages first, since, for a long time during the two projectors' development, projectiondesign seemed to be slightly ahead of the opposition. But ultimately the extra complexities of the PD model – it does, after all, cost six grand more than the SIM2 – seems to have lost them the top slot.
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Actually, now we've mentioned the Model Three 1080's price – all $41,750 with a Standard 1.6 to 2.3:1 lens and VPS33000 scaler– it probably makes sense to try and explain just why PD thinks its projector is really worth that much.
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Actually manufacturing a 1920 x 1080 native DLP chipset is a wee bit tricky – not surprising when you consider that such a device needs to fit over two million independently controllable mirrors onto the back of a single controlling chipset. But of course, SIM2's cheaper 1080 DLP model uses the same chipset, so that alone can't explain the price.
So for more justification, let's turn to the Model Three 1080's second box. For yes, even though it's one of the chunkiest projectors around (the exact opposite of PD's usually strikingly diminutive projectors), it still can't fit in all the processing PD wanted to provide with its single-chip flagship.
