 Hi, I'm Neil Kihun. Welcome to Epson's 2020 ISC stand. I'm the vice president of professional displays for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia. So Epson as world leader is basically LCD projector, right? Yes, everything we make is Epson 3LCD. Our panels are produced and made in Japan and it's very important that we own on the proprietary technology for every projector that we sell. So what are these projectors we see up here? So here we have three blended L12000Q projectors and these are native 4K resolution with our XO2 ultra short throw lens. So two unique competitive advantages of Epson, you can see first of all the projectors themselves. This is native 4K, we don't use any pixel shifting or wobbling technology and our XO2 lens, 0.350 offset lens. And you can see here we've got it blended in a beautiful virtual reality cave with our partners from Igloo, you can see here. How do you blend? We use a software system from our technology partner here, so in this case it's Igloo. So we always partner up with the most innovative partners to produce this software. So they've engaged with Epson and used their own proprietary technology to create this cave. So is this a top selling professional market projector? Is it new? Yeah, so this is brand new. So this product is just being launched and we only launched it last month. These 12,000Qs already completely sold out. So yes, what you're seeing here is one of our most innovative technology products. We'll show you a few others on the stand as we walk round. So it's called the EBL 12,000Q, does that mean 12,000 lumen? Yes, 12,000 lumen and the Q is basically indicating that it's a 4K native resolution. Alright, and you don't pixel shift at all, but you have something called a 4K enhanced? Yes, that's right. Is that some kind of upscaling? What is it? Yeah, exactly, that's right. So that's basically we call it wobbulation or enhancing. And there's nothing wrong with that technology. It's something that Epson also is keen on, but this technology doesn't use any enhancement at all. So particularly for markets like simulation, obviously rental and stage in market, and this kind of very, very high resolution, high rendering, then you would really want to have that native 4K resolution. So this is HDR, does that mean you have 10 bit colors? You have lots of contrast? Yeah, exactly. We can send you some statistics afterwards that give you the full breakdown of it. But it's our first installation projected to accommodate HDR. And if you're looking over here, it's a very popular corner here. What's happening here? Okay, so a couple of things. First of all, here we see it again with the native 4K products. Now we see this in portrait mode. It's very important that there are very few brands that you will see showing this projector in portrait mode with our U04 lens. So we're doing this because we can show the power of the projector in portrait. Well, some of our competitors will see a drop-off in performance when it's rotated. But you can see here, we've got incredible performance even in portrait mode. And this is with one of our short throw lenses. This is really showing off the brightness, no? Yeah, absolutely. For the brightness and the resolution. And remember, this is only 12,000 lumens of resolution. You walk around this show today and you'll see some very, very high resolution products in very dark environments where you look at Epson. There's no darkness in our environment. We don't have a ceiling on our stand unlike some of our competitors. We're very proud to show this product only 12,000 lumens in terms of Pro-AV. But look at the performance which shows the innovative, unique technology that Epson has. And remember, this is Epson technology with Epson panels, Epson light engine. So is it also some unique kind of screen like we're projected onto? Is there a special thick material that makes it shine and bright back? Is it like shiny? Yeah, we have a partnership with AV Stunful. So this is an AV Stunful screen. So yeah, so they have some proprietary technology to make sure that they obviously maintain as much light as possible. And we thank Stunful for that. There are all of our screens. And that brings out the best of the technology. But of course, it doesn't matter how good the screen is, if you get a huge drop-off in light when you go into portrait mode or you don't have the resolution to show the projectors like this. This is pretty much like a free floor, free story house. It's big. Absolutely. It's big and it's beautiful and look at the richness of the colours as well. So one of the things with Epson 3 LCD technology, particularly compared to one chip technology from DLP, is that you get this incredible beautiful colour brightness, colour light output because of the three chips. So you get this beautiful, rich primary colours that you can see on the screen just now, which is why we're showing these beautiful colours. It's really bringing to life. You almost have that feeling of 3D about it. You can put your hand in and touch it. And so if you look at the museums and these kinds of markets, who's the leader? Is it Epson or is it DLP? No, I mean, well, there's two things. First of all, Epson is the number one brand in projection technology. It's the number one brand in ProEV technology. We're the number one for all projection technology but also for 6,000 lumens and above, we are number one. In terms of quantity? Yeah, in terms of quantity. Absolutely. So we have the highest market share of any brand and LCD has the highest technology share over DLP as well. So basically both LCD and Epson are the significant majority of market share versus DLP. Here's another beautiful demo. This is a very wide lens, right? What are we looking at here? Yeah, we can have a little look here. So here we see, so this is a 1755, this is a 15,000 lumens projector. This is one of our best selling products. This is with 4K enhancement and we have the short throw lens 0.47 to 0.57 to 1. This is the LU03S. So it's a very big screen for very short distance. Absolutely. For Epson, our lenses are one of our competitive advantages. All our lenses are 4K, unlike many of our competition and actually on test patterns, they're very, very close to 8K. What that means is we can drive them very, very hard and you can see the performance does not drop off despite the fact we're at quite a short distance here, up to 0.47. You also, with this projector, this is 15,000 lumens. It also has 4K enhancement technology and it also has an integrated camera for automatic image correction. So that's something that's very proprietary to our technology which is this built-in camera function. And when we come on to the bigger lumen projectors, the 30,000 lumen you will see that our camera technology even does auto stacking which reduces setup time when we're talking about big installations. But we'll talk about that when we get to the 30,000 lumens. All right. So it's a very popular but it's not native 4K. No. But what does it enhance mean? Does that kind of mean double the resolution compared to... Yeah. What it means is that it can take a 4K signal and basically it will remap the signal based on the native resolution of the projector. So we use technology to be able to enhance the image and you can see here this is a really, really high quality image at a short distance. So you can see here that, I mean, we call it our next level viewing experience with this enhancement. So yes, of course, this is the ultimate to have a native 4K product but of course it's expensive and we know that for some markets then this is good enough. What's the difference between DLP's oscillations and what you do with enhanced? Well, the thing is... You're not oscillating? No. If you're talking about the difference between DLP and LCD technology then there's a number of differences. And we can... It's probably good to talk about that at the end actually. Let's talk about that at the end. Can you show some of the lenses? Do you have some lenses you were talking about here? Daniel. Is this part of what you're talking about where you have a whole bunch of lenses? Okay, so one of the key things for Epson and one of our key competitive advantages is that we have one range of lenses from 5,500 lumens to 20,000 lumens. 12, in fact. No other brand in the market has such a small range of lenses and the 4K lenses at the same time. The same range of lenses from 5,500 to 20,000 and they're also 4K, which means with Epson you're not having to invest a huge amount in additional lenses. When we bring out a new range of projectors it's with the same lenses and that in itself is one of the most unique pieces of technology never mind the actual products themselves but the ability to have the same range of lenses right across the range, we only have two lens ranges. This one and our 25,000 and 30,000 lumens lens range which you see below. These are big ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these are for our larger projector products that you'll see next door. Just at the end I'll introduce you to Daniel and we can talk a little bit about the difference between 4K enhanced Epson versus DLP technology, et cetera, et cetera. All right, should we continue walking around? Yeah, yeah. What's happening here? They are wearing Averios, which are like augmented reality glasses. If we had the Averio BT350 on we would be able to see information augmenting itself about the visitor experience that we are currently having. So here we mocked up one imagines that one's getting driven around and I think that's Prague from where I remember. And here we can see a potential tourist who's getting information about this site mapped onto what he's seeing. Because the Averio is pretty much one of the leading AR glasses on the market, right? So these are AR glasses rather than VR. So the difference is that these are augmenting on top of what you can see rather than you being wrapped in a virtual reality cave because when you put VR glasses on you can't see anything apart from the experience itself. These we can see... It's OLED, it's OLED micro displays. Yeah, our OLED technology. Your OLED. Yeah, so originally the first generation of these glasses were LCD and then we moved on to OLED technology and this is unique to Epson. Well, it's absolute black as well. So you get the full clarity with the glasses with the OLED technology, which is the big difference. So you're not losing any vision by putting the glasses on with the OLED technology. If you walk around here, there's a big wall. What's this demo? What are you showing off here? So every brand has, let's say, a bit of a show stopper. So we call this Epson Unboxed and this is like showing different transitions, showing graphics, mapping in a massive environment and at the end you will see something appearing at the top to complete the overall viewing experience and this is showing one of the key competitive advantages of projection as a technology, which is projection mapping. So projection mapping more and more you see in the modern world and this really can only be done with projection technology and of course we believe at Epson we have the superior technology and then you will see at the end the completion of the show. So these are the projectors over there? It's not a real projection? No, we can see here the projectors on top. And together with cameras and somehow they can map? So this is all done with our agent, with our partner, CrucialFX to set all this up and it's like a show, we can see it. So it's partly all, it's partly visual and then at the end you will see a final reveal. Nice. Shall we walk around this way? We can see here that we're simulating by robotics, we're mapping robotics. Just to give an idea about the kind of power of the projection, remember this is quite a high lux environment here. So of course what we're seeing here is the cars being built is a relatively high lux environment actually but we can still see there's a lot of impact here. It's very intricate. Are those enhanced right displays? They're not fucking native, right? No, these are 20,000 lumens, no, exactly, no. Because this is again done with a short throw lens, the LU03S and nails the reveal at the end of the car. So that's your Formula One? Yeah, mapped beautifully using our L20,000 U projector. Cool. How many projectors do you have around this demo? Do you have a bunch of them around? We do. They're in pairs to get a big range. Let's go around here. So that's cool. Eight. Eight, yeah. All right, so can we continue the tour? We can. Yeah? So what's next? What should we check? Probably there's a couple of things left we want to show you. So the highest brightness product that we have currently is 25,000 lumens but this will now change in the summer to 30,000 lumens. Now the 30,000 lumens will come in two colours, black and white. Which ones? Yeah. And then we can see here, well this is a 25K, we'll show you the 30K in action because we've actually got it, the 30K being used next door. But the 30,000 lumens which will replace this 25 will come with this new lens, this new 0.35 ultra short throw lens. And this in itself is an amazing piece of engineering. So what's special about this short throw? It's like an arms. Yeah, yeah. And what goes into making, like this is a big professional projector, what's in here? What's happening there? The thing about this projector is it might seem big to you but actually if it was next to most of the competition it would actually seem very small. So you can have a look at some of the other projectors around in this show and actually this is incredibly compact. The customer insight that we received here is that we want bright but we also want compact. And as we move from the 25 to the 30K we also have features such as the camera mode where we can do auto stacking and also we have interchangeable boards. So in terms of like connectivity and distribution of signal then we are also future proof in this technology at the same time. Where did the boards go? At the site. Is it like on this area here? Yeah. You just swap one out with the other one in? Yes, exactly. So you make them future proof? Yes, exactly. So this is a 20,000 lumens. 20,000 lumens in white. We can see the 25,000 and we can finish with the 30,000 that you will see double stacked next door where we have nearly 60,000 lumens of light. Bright, compact, a very, very good price. So when you see this awesome big display what are the markets? Can you list them a little bit as like professional? Is it cinema or not cinema? Not cinema. These are not cinema products. For that kind of product you're looking at first of all rental and staging. We're also looking at museums. For example, that's quite big. Auditoriums. There really is no limit as to where these could be used. Obviously projection mapping is one of the key things. They're just a handful of the the large ones. There's digital signage and even in some corporate environments kind of big boardroom environments as well potentially they could have these types of products. And Epson has been doing these LCD projectors for like decades? Yeah, absolutely. We only make LCD. Now we're moving into this area which is collaborative meetings collaborative learning. So again we're using laser technology here and we can see here that we're also the leading brand in all projection technology not just the real high end here. So here we can see Trevor demonstrating what could be a collaborative meeting environment a virtual meeting where we can talk to somebody else here that's in the meeting and we can cross collaborate with each other and these kind of things. So using a short throw and then some sensing happening there on the wall? Yes, exactly. That's right. So this is a busy for the collaboration area? Yes, absolutely. And the 30,000 you're showing it? 30,000 we can show you. Next door. Maybe just before we show you that to finish we can also show you our light scene technology and this is all about visual experience. You can see how popular this is. Sorry. And what we can show here is that we actually have spent a lot of money on research and we've done an experience of research where we talked to 10,000 consumers in 26 different countries and we had some really interesting insights where they showed that if a customer one in three customers that we surveyed that were millennials said that if they saw and augmented an interactive retail premises they would go in and see it compared to a standard static display. So what we can see here is if you are a retailer and you are fighting this retail, here we can show augmented reality. So this might be your highest margin product, your best selling product. Compared to say a static display you can change things, you can change the messages. We can see here that nearly 70% of millennials in that survey I mentioned said that they would go into a virtual experiential shopping premises that otherwise they wouldn't have done. So this is really enhancing the shopping experience and we can see here different solutions. A furniture store for example where we can change as they are showing we can change the backgrounds we can augment different colors onto the furniture. So from a retailer's point of view this is showing different colors, different experience at home. The chances of a sale in this environment are much higher. Do you have some customers already implementing all this? Yes, absolutely. So for example with this product the light scene we already have some interesting partnerships for example Ikea in Poland is one that we've already got this product into. So we're already partnering with some big global brands such as Ikea for example. And what is this kind of protector? It's very targeted lens. This is the product here the light scene EV100 series and the insight that we received from the market was that our customers want to engage with projection but they found it maybe a little bit too big or the wrong size so you can see here that this is built to go on a lighting track this is much smaller, more aesthetically pleasing than a standard projector but it delivers an incredible it packs a real punch and the key thing about projection is that unlike other technologies you can have this wall back when it's not being used when you project onto a wall there's no big screen there's no LED here there's no big flat panel this is a standard wall that we can project onto and when you turn it off you can have the wall back and in retail environments we know that space is at a premium. Let's finish on that 30K This one also Ah this is the EVW70 So again this is another when we talk about technology what we're trying to do here is make it small and portable so this is a portable laser signage projector we can go up to 150 inches with this really small projector and it's 2000 lumens HD resolution and it's easy to install so for Epson it's really important to have fit and forget so this is a very simple to install set up but delivers a really really nice screen it's a laser signage projector we see and beautiful performance as well that 30K is here so these are two 30K projectors stacked this is nearly 60,000 lumens of light with the two 30K projectors so we're often asked are you going to bring a 50K or 60K and our answer is we don't need to because with two 30Ks you can get virtually the same amount of light but the usage out of these projectors is much higher because obviously the demand for 50 or 60K projectors is much lower than the demand for 30K we can see this also has the interface boards it's compatible with the current 25K that you saw earlier and it has this integrated camera that works with our projection software including this auto stacking assist and mechanical shutter which is very very important in the live events market and we're showing this with a short throw lens so you're showing it here it looks very very bright how soon is this on the market in the summer time this will be out in June and are there any pre-orders happening already? there are yes I mean this is going to be an extremely popular model we're already talking to a number of our partners not just orders for rental and staging but also orders for projects as well obviously confidentiality can't talk too much about that so even though Epson has been doing it for decades but the market is really booming this stuff is big it's growing fast we've been number one in projection since 2001 but we're also number one in pro EV projection and absolutely we believe at Epson that we are growing the projection market again with this type of technology so the projection market for us is growing full of opportunities and that's why all of our product innovation is built with the customer in mind we spend a lot of time talking to customers asking them what they want and our strategic planning is based on that customer insight nice I can introduce you to Daniel you can talk a little bit about you had a couple of questions about the 4k enhancement and the differences for example LCD is that the perfect match for projections totally so the benefit of an LCD system is it's using a three chip technology not a single chip technology which means you're getting all the colour reproduction which means we can get much brighter much more vivid images from the same brightness as you would see claimed by other manufacturers so for example behind you see what is just 12,000 lumens on a very large 4m high image using three LCD technology if you saw that from our competitors using single chip solutions they would need either two or three times that amount of brightness or they would use multiple projectors to fill that same screen so that's really where the benefit of LCD comes in by using the multi colour the three chip system LCD is pretty much perfect for putting a bunch of light through the liquid crystal and to it's the whole point, it's having a backlight so it's perfect for predictions also right? so the projectors all have their benefits but LCD gives you that consistent colour and high image quality at a reasonable price compared to solutions there are other three chip solutions out there but they're much more expensive for the same solution but there might also be some different kind of challenges and reaching different things like who's going to be the first one to do 8K projectors how far in the future is that maybe there are concepts for 8K projectors already out there the big challenge for the projection market is not so much about the ability to produce the hardware to produce that image it's actually more driven by the fact there's nothing out there to deliver this content to it in the first place so in the past the display market was driven by the delivery systems now we're finding it's the opposite way round that the displays are actually pulling the delivery systems through so even today delivering good quality 4K over any distance is almost impossible there are so few good quality affordable solutions for true 4K for the large images even for ourselves, for our own standards we face real challenges finding good solutions for delivering that 8K takes that to a whole other level so if you think you need to then 4 times the amount of data you already need for 4K just 16 times the amount of data you need for an HD signal that becomes incredibly challenging the projectors in theory yes we could produce them displays to technologies could exist to do it but there's just not the delivery system to give them the image quality they need is it because all these compression technologies you would see the artefacts because the screen is so big so it's actually what you can do with the regular 8K TVs that's just only 75-85 inch here you want to do like 200 inch or something to be honest to see the benefit of such a high resolution you need a very extremely large screen the problem is that that stretches any artefacts within the data very quickly and it's unlike the home environment where you may be transmitting that distance that it's signal over 1 or 2 meters at most here we're talking about a minimum transmission distance of 15-20 meters becomes a very different technology that's needed to deliver over that distance and can be consistent as well you can't afford any drop in signal if you want to project multiple images all at the same time you have to rely on synchronization again something's not a concern for a single image at home now we have HDMI 2.1 so potentially that would be a good solution right just connect a long HDMI cable an HDMI cable at best for video maybe 10 meters for audio much more than 5 meters over a single HDMI cable so again, fine for the home environment absolutely not the solution for a pro EV market they want to do with fiber no fiber is a solution but it's a very expensive solution there's no standardization for it so there are around 6 different options at the moment in the market and that is expanding so until there's some standardization even then the way of getting compressing that data to fit down a fiber cable is still extremely challenging this one, this is an enhanced 4K so how does it enhance 4K compared with the DLP oscillating so this is using our 4K enhancement technology so it's using standard WXGA chip but it's doubling the pixels by using a single channel shifting technology to give us close to 4K image quality so it's shifting twice that's compared to this product which is a native 4K resolution on the screen so the very few people can offer at this level of product so you'll see most of the systems again using some sort of wobbling system so the oscillating, the wobbling is similar which on a small scale, that can look okay but once you start going up to large scale or particularly if you want to look at detailed information you can really see the effect of that wobbling system there's ups and only wobble twice like it's not possible to wobble 4 times like take a 4K chip, wobble it 4 times you have 8K so in theory, yes we could do that but at the moment we don't feel we can produce a good enough image quality to do that so it's something we're thinking about for the future but the processing capabilities are not there at the moment in terms of brightness and contrast who can achieve more, is it DLP or is it LCD? from a native contrast point of view LCD will always offer a higher native contrast we rarely see native contrast quoted by any of our competitors but we will quote, for this level of product around 2000 to 1 native contrast and up to 3000 to 1 native contrast on some of our larger projectors when compared to DLP technology they're normally around about 6 to 800 to 1 native contrast ratio and in terms of brightness is there any limitations with LCD compared to the competitor? like who can get the brightest? it's not a question if you can get the brightest it's how big and how expensive do you want that brightness to be so any of the manufacturers could produce a projector that could produce 100, 200,000 lumens but that would be incredibly expensive and incredibly large the technology itself, yes, can be developed to work on that scale whichever technology is you need a larger chip to go to those larger brightnesses because you just can't reflect that much more light or transmit that much more light through a small chip does Epson talk about working in the micro-reality space or is there do you see any chance that micro-reality will provide a new competitor to this kind of business? not currently, no, it's not something we're concerned with at the moment so just getting more and more brightness more packing more stuff into making all the customers happy with all kinds of new projects it gives a lot of new ideas, when people see this they can be saying I want to do this I want to do that we're very much about giving the customers the tools for the solution they want so it's not about selling a box it's about selling a solution some tools right here, what are those tools when you talk about protection tools or software there's some professional tools this is for multi-projection setup so it makes it really easy through the software to connect multiple projectors to a network and then you can control them set them up, monitor them as well we've got the setup over there what condition the projectors are in what temperatures they're at what are they on, are they okay and that can be done either locally or from a distance, you could be using that software for multiple sites across the country, across the world across the town so it gives you a real flexibility to be able to control and keep an eye on your product