It is with great pride and some bittersweetness I announce with this column that I am stepping down from my role as the editor-in-chief at ProjectorCentral. After more than 40 years in consumer electronics publishing—my first CES was the Vegas show of January 1985—I am retiring from full-time work to slow things down a bit and pursue other interests. My replacement as of the new year will be Jeremy Glowacki, pictured at right. Jeremy is a 20+ year A/V industry veteran who has for the last six years served as the founding executive editor of Residential Tech Today, a magazine and website he helped create from the ground up in 2018. He spent most of the 18 years prior as the longtime editor at Residential Systems, another respected mag serving the integrator and manufacturer communities, one which he also helped create and launch. Jeremy was named a CEDIA Fellow in 2012, and many readers already know him from his earlier work and his long association with that organization. If you have crossed paths with him, you will understand why I am so grateful to be handing the baton to such an experienced and gifted editor. I know he will serve the projector industry well as he embarks on his deep-dive into our quirky, competitive, and technologically exciting category, and I wish him the best on this next stage of his career.

I have been fortunate myself to have enjoyed a great career that included at times reporting on the CE trade for retailers and acting as a consumer advocate in senior editorial positions for various A/V enthusiast publications. My six years at ProjectorCentral have served as a wonderful capstone that exposed me to the projector segment in a moment of great flux. When I first began in 2018, lamps still largely ruled the roost in both the commercial and consumer projector spaces, and laser models were high-end, premium products—too expensive to justify unless you were a fancy theme park, a digital cinema, or a well-heeled home theater buff. Today, projectors with solid-state laser and LED light engines are de rigueur, and are affordable enough that even financially-challenged school districts and budget-restricted enthusiasts are hard-pressed to buy yet another lamp projector.

Also remarkable during my tenure has been the speed with which projectors have physically shrunk while growing their light output. The push into solid-state tech has brought with it continual improvements in the efficiency of laser diodes and cooling techniques. In 2018, a 20,000-lumen laser projector weighed more than 100 pounds and occupied perhaps a 30 x 24-inch footprint. Today the most compact 20K-lumen models weigh around 50 pounds, fit into a 25 x 18-inch chassis, and can deliver their full brightness on a 115-volt power line—something also unheard of just a couple of years ago.

Along with the projector industry's rapid advancement of tech, during my six years in the catbird seat I have observed the industry facing some emerging challenges, as well as new opportunies. Most recently, the physical growth and dropping prices of large flat-panel displays have started to pose a threat to projection's utility for businesses and consumers. When I started with ProjectorCentral, the prohibitive cost of giant panels made a 100-inch image for a conference or living room the strict domain of projection. But today's biggest TV makers are now churning out LCD glass at this size by the boatload, and engaging in historic price wars to have the lowest advertised ticket for a 98- or 100-inch set. When you can spend $1,500 on a 100-inch TV against the equal or higher cost of a less-bright projector and screen combo, it pushes projection's cost-benefit proposition into image sizes which noticeably exceed that.

That said, there remains solid demand for those really big pictures from home theater enthusiasts. And from a commercial perspective, the emergence of remote work in the aftermath of the pandemic and the adoption of widescreen display formats such as Microsoft's Front Row provide a cogent argument, if not a requirement, for those super-sized images in conference rooms and group meeting spaces. The ability of these formats to allow all the participants in a large meeting to remain visible while also sharing documents enhances communication and connection in a way that can't be fully appreciated until you see it in action. Hopefully, this will be an opening for the industry.

Another change I've observed is vastly expanded competition within the home theater and entertainment projector business. An industry that had been largely dominated prior to my arrival by a handful of established names has seen a serious influx of participants to the U.S. market. We'll put aside for now the sub-$100 junk projectors still sold in volume on Amazon whose brandings change weekly and whose poor image quality gives the industry a black eye among unknowing consumers. But many newer players in the U.S. appeared with relatively advanced hardware, ready to tap into emerging markets for laser UST projectors or lifestyle portables.

Unfortunately, some of these manufacturers also brought with them from the gun-slinging Wild Wild East of the Asian markets a propensity for "lumen lying," the practice of overstating or obfuscating the real brightness of a projector to gain market advantage. As we've been reporting for a few years now, several ran headlong into Epson's dragnet to punish sellers who overstate brightness specs with civil lawsuits claiming false advertising. In most cases Epson has been able to extract a commitment from the manufacturer to use the industry-accepted ISO21118 measurement standard or its predecessor (and essentially equivalent) ANSI method, thus putting all players on an equal field. The company deserves ample credit and real gratitude for taking on the expense and effort associated with being the lumen police for an unregulated U.S. projector industry.

Nonetheless, even these efforts cannot solve all of today's problems with false brightness reporting. As I've noted in some of my writings, the international ISO21118 standard is merely the best and most widely accepted methodology available right now, but it is hampered by a ridiculous 20% tolerance that some manufacturers use to game the system: they simply declare a brightness spec that is nearly 20% higher than what the projector is engineered for. The product officially makes spec, but might deliver 15% to 20% less brightness than advertised. You can find examples of this confirmed by the published measurements in our reviews.

Some brands have also of late been actively building cheat modes into their projectors that temporarily rev up the brightness when the unit detects the white test pattern used to measure brightness, or which require a manual shift into a high-power picture mode that exists just to make spec for a measurement. That last bit isn't new; we often find the brightest mode in any projector heavily green-tinted and unpalatable for viewing, which is bad enough. What is new is having these picture modes accompanied by a dramatic increase in fan noise and an on-screen warning that using them for more than a brief period will fry the projector. The result is the same: a projector that advertises considerably higher brightness than can actually be achieved in day-to-day use. As I exit my ProjectorCentral post, I'll go on record with my conviction that a lack of consistent and fundamentally honest brightness accountability is among the most serious issues facing the future of the consumer projector business, particularly as it heads into what could be a new period of growth (for reasons I'll explain below). Addressing these loopholes and the inability of consumers to count fully on manufacturer integrity should be a priority, lest the industry shoot itself in the foot and spoil its opportunity with a new customer base.

This brings me to the last significant development I've witnessed in the last six years, and the one I find most exciting for the future. It has always been my goal at ProjectorCentral to spread the immersive joys of projection to the broader consumer audience unwilling to jump through the hurdles and costs associated with complex installation. In light of this I've been surprised and encouraged by the rapidly growing interest in what we call the lifestyle portables, many of which are highly sophisticated products featuring state-of-the-art auto-setup and light-source technologies. The best of these are darn good projectors, and they and their less-pricey brethren are being gobbled up not so much by geeky enthusiasts as by families or individuals more interested in temporarily dropping a box on the coffee table and pointing it at the wall or ceiling for a night of streaming or gaming. Could it be this projector-as-appliance approach will finally open the floodgates to the mass market? Let's hope so.

In closing, I'd like to voice my appreciation to the many who supported me during my tenure. To Jerry Cintas, the co-founder of ProjectorCentral who appointed me as only the second editor in the company's now 25-year history, thank you for having faith in me and standing by with such integrity and generosity. To my ProjectorCentral colleagues Kerri Petersen, Jessica Fields, and Bobette McCann, you are all such incredibly gifted professionals and have been such a pleasure to work with. I have had the great fortune to work with a good number of outstanding writers and reviewers, among them (in no particular order) Brian Nadel, Sammie Prescott Jr., Nikki Kahl, David Stone, John Higgins, Tim Adams, Terry Paullin, Mark Henninger, Scott Wilkinson, Mike McNamara, Michael Hamilton, and Paul Vail — thank you all so much for your contributions that made ProjectorCentral a better and more interesting read. And finally, many thanks to the multitude of public relations reps and product managers who wrangled products and factchecks and photos through these years and were always pleasant and ready to assist in any way. You have been invaluable partners, and I have been especially lucky to call some of you friends. To one and all, I again offer my gratitude and wish you a most happy and successful new year ahead.

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