ULTRA-short & sweet

Pretty much 18 months ago, I spent an evening in a cliff-top house in Sydney. When I stood in the lounge room, to the east was the unending Pacific Ocean, while to the west, against the wall, was a 100-inch ‘TV’. That was the $19,999 100-inch Hisense 100RXL Laser TV, the first of its ilk, combining ultra-short-throw projection with all the conveniences of TV-like operation.

This time around I spent 90 minutes in a Sydney office — there was no view in any direction — with another 100-inch ‘TV’. This one was the $6999 100-inch Hisense 100L5F Laser TV. Prices, clearly, have come down for this new breed of home entertainment.

Equipment

Let’s remind ourselves exactly what a ‘Laser TV’ is. Instead of a direct-view TV panel, it consists of a projector and projection screen, in this case bundled together. The projector is of the ultra-short-throw variety which sits at the foot of the screen, which is optimised to work with the upwardly thrown image from the main unit. And the projector has all (or most) of the features you’d expect in a smart TV.

While ultra-short-throw designs are not new, they have hitherto been fairly dumb devices — that is, they had no networking, no actual free-to-air TV tuner in them. But that is not the case for Hisense’s offerings, either in previous years or this. The projector part is the full bottle,