All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Gadget Lab editor Dylan Tweney and I may just be getting old, and therefore easily impressed by new-fangled technology, but we agree on one thing: 3-D projectors kinda blow our minds.
They're magic-lanterns. How can a lot of light spilled on a wall give giant, deep 3-D image, with all the clever eye-trickery that entails? The answer is, of course, electronics. although that doesn't make the trick any less wondrous. In fact, it's all done with mirrors.
Acer's two new 3-D projectors use a combination of DLP chips and high refresh rates to ensure that they can keep up withy the 3D action. DLP uses tiny mirrors which flip and move to reflect the light out and onto a screen. The H5360 offers 720p hi-def and HDMI with its 120Hz refresh rate, while the cheaper X1261 has just composite and S-video, with similar video specs. Both are "3-D ready".
This means that you'll need some extra hardware to actually watch 3-D movies. This comes in the form of NVIDIA 3-D Vision, a combination of spectacles, a compatible graphics card and a computer. This hardware does the actual 3-D processing, but crucially syncs with the display in order to send the right image to the right eye.
This last is the real trick for 3D projectors. They need flip those tiny mirrors fast enough and accurately enough to keep up with the wireless active-shutter glasses that make sure your eyes are seeing different things. Everything else is just light on a screen.
I'm seriously thinking about buying a projector to replace our old 12-inch analog TV (Spanish TV switches over to digital this month). And after seeing all the 3-D movie demos at CES this year, I'm totally sold. In fact, give it a year and you probably won't be able to buy a non 3-D projector.
The H5360 is $70 and the X1261 $580.
H5360 Product page [Acer]
X1261 Product page [Acer]
