Japanese electrical products brand Ricoh, best known for its high-end cameras, supplies its lenses to some of the leading projector makers around the world, and it’s also building its own through its U.S. subsidiary PFU America.
The company has just launched the Ricoh PJ UHL3660, a high-end and high-quality ultra short-throw projector model that’s designed to be used in a range of scenarios, such as boardrooms, classrooms, museums and live entertainment venues, as well as home theatres, with the promise of “colour-rich 4K images from just centimetres away.”
The Ricoh PJ UHL3660 is based on the Japanese company’s proprietary twin laser and phosphor wheel technology, and can deliver an eye-searing 6,000 lumens of brightness, which should be enough to ensure zero wash out even in bright, sunlit rooms during daylight hours. According to Ricoh, the high brightness of its images is further enhanced with its OptiBright tech, which is designed to “maximise light efficiency” while keeping power consumption to a minimum.
In addition, the company boasts that the Ricoh PJ UHL3660 has an extraordinarily long lifetime of up to 40,000 hours – in contrast to the standard 20,000 hours that most projector makers aim for.
Other high-end features include four-way pixel-shifting to deliver 4K UHD visuals, and the device is said to have a 0.24:1 throw ratio, which means it can produce an 85-inch image when sat just 0.4 inches from the projection surface, be it a wall or a screen. If you position it 15-inches away from the wall, the image size can be blown up to 160-inches.
Ricoh adds that the PJ UHL3660 has a dynamic contrast ratio of 5,000,000:1, and there’s a HDR mode that “massages” the contrast to ensure “visuals with even more realism”.
In terms of flexibility, the Ricoh PJ UHL3660 stands out with its 360-degree mounting support, portrait projection capabilities and multi-image blending features, which enable it to be placed just about anywhere, at any height, including on the ceiling, the floor or anywhere between.
For setup, there are horizontal and vertical keystone adjustment capabilities, plus four-corner and six-point alignment options, and a bunch of image presets for viewing movies, documents, power points and so on. The idea is that setup becomes as painless as possible, and to aid with that, it also features a Wall Colour mode that tweaks the image to fit non-white surfaces.
The only real negative is that the Ricoh PJ UHL3660 is not a smart projector – instead, you’ll need to plug in a device, such as a streaming stick or set-top box, through the HDMI port or Ethernet LAN to access streaming content. That said, users do have the option of casting content from Android and Windows devices over Miracast.
As you can see, the PJ UHL3660 actually has tons of connections:
Ricoh also highlighted the durability of the PJ UHL3660, saying it can withstand ingress from dust at IP6X standards. There’s also an “advanced cooling system” that helps to keep the projector running cool even in the hottest environments. Ricoh claims it can operate perfectly well at temperatures of up to 45 °C, which is pretty impressive.
Projectors tend to be expensive things, even if they have more limited features, so a higher-end device like this won’t be cheap, and Ricoh says it will go on sale in the U.S. priced at around $6,000. It will launch there first, before coming to Europe later, but there’s no word yet on U.K. prices.
“This highly versatile new 4K advanced laser projector delivers stunning visuals that will wow any audience,” promised PFU America’s Daisuke Kutsuwada. “It will do so even in limited space environments, providing an efficient and cost-effective solution with easy and maintenance-free performance.”
