Red Ray 4K cinema laser projector on display at NAB Show 2012

At NAB Show 2012, Red officially unveiled its previously teased Red Ray 4K cinema projector. All matte-black metal and visible bolts, the device looks as though it has been lifted directly from science fiction — especially given the fact that movies projected by this impressive piece of tech will be blasted at the screen by a laser.
There will be two editions of the Red Ray: The less-than-$10,000 home model supporting screens up to 15 feet in size should be released to market sometime this year, while a more expensive professional model to suit larger screens will be released later. The device has a rated laser life of over 25,000 hours, supports both 2D and passive 3D (with 4K projection for each eye) from a mean-looking T1.8 50mm lens, and has dedicated access panels for the laser phase adjustment oscillator, the angular refraction aberration indexer, and the lens filter.
Reports from the NAB Show floor uniformly praise the performance of the Red Ray, citing impressive contrast, color reproduction, dynamic range, and clearly defined small detail.
Beyond the laser projection itself, Red Ray is outfitted with a lot of extra wizardry. To feed the projector with high-res video files, there’s an internal SSD hard drive, an SD card slot, USB socket, and a couple of HDMI sockets. The Red Ray website suggests that there might be a future version with Firewire and eSATA connectivity, too. Considering the projector is capable of pumping out 120 fps, at 4K-3D, there’s probably a very powerful processor under the hood, too — much like the Red Epic-X 5K camera.
It would seem logical for lasers to someday take over as the primary method for projector illumination. As we learned from BMW’s latest and greatest headlamps, laser diodes are significantly brighter, use less power, last longer, and are physically smaller, making them better in almost every way when compared to LEDs or the more traditional projector lamps. The only negative is in the price; it would be safe to assume that a sizable portion of the $10,000 price point could be attributed to the new pew-pew laser beam technology. While out of reach for most consumers, it is quite possible that the shift to laser-based projectors will happen in cinemas in the not-too-distant future, hopefully going at least a small way toward justifying the price of movie tickets these days.