Essential Install | Habitech
Great 4K projection
relies on a teamwork
of smaller pixels and
a finer screen surface
How Eight Million Brilliant Individuals
Can Make The Big Picture Perfect
When it comes to 4K, it’s the little things that produce the results.
Habitech MD, Jonathan Pengilley, extols the virtues of great team
building on a micro level.
The awesome
JVC DLA-Z1
laser projector
This is a story about teamwork. It’s about the millions of
small, unsung contributions that make the big stuff happen.
We’re living in a world enthralled by the big numbers,
results and events, but reliant on tiny tech triumphs.
Our big digital existence, the Internet, banking,
industry, transport, communications, custom installation,
you name it, would grind to a halt if it weren’t for the
successful choreography of countless little binary
connections, switching precisely on cue. Paradoxically,
the way we develop the big is by tweaking the small
and just as all the energy in the galaxy can be explained
at the smallest quantum level, the truth behind the big
performance headlines is a story of micro improvement
and teamwork. Although it’s easy to overlook, small is
beautiful and also very powerful.
million tiny but significant individuals and the marginal
gains achieved by improving the quality of each and
every one of them are brilliantly intensified in the bigger
picture. I have seen the god of small things at his best in
the unity of micro engineering from JVC and Projecta; two
of our home cinema brands that understand the principle
of marginal gains at the pixel level. Their complementary
R&D in praise of the pixel has produced the UK’s most
successful 4K display team: JVC ‘s astonishing Z1 4K/HDR
laser projector and Projecta’s silky smooth HD progressive
screen surface. In the 18Gbps universe and in the wider
one beyond, a team of incremental performance tweaks is
the covert force behind the headlines.
The collective power
of marginal gains
For the Z1, JVC has further miniaturised its Direct-Drive
Image Light Amplification (D-ILA) liquid crystal tech
to reduce the pixel gap by a giant 31% to just 3.8 µm
for the smoothest most detailed true 4K (4096x2160)
pictures. They’re illuminated on the largest screens by
the Z1’s ‘Blue-Escent’ laser light source, which produces
a dazzling 3000lm to raise peak brightness on HDR
pictures for spectacular image depth. The diode’s
dynamic light source control produces instantaneous
light output according to the scene’s brightness,
emulating the natural latency of the human eye and
realising a contrast ratio approaching ∞:1. Enhanced
by a combination of the laser light and a new cinema
filter, colour from the three dedicated RGB D-ILA devices
achieves a gamut of 100% DCI P3 and over 80% of
BT2020 to reproduce the most vivid spectrum through
We all remember how Sir Bradley Wiggins won gold
with a monumental effort, but fewer of us realise
that it was achieved through the application
of marginal gains: the sum of many small
performance tweaks, insignificant in
isolation but when added tog