audiovisual cinema TV
When we think of design icons in hi-fi and AV, we might turn first to Denmark, or perhaps the US, UK and Japan. But if you ask a photographer the same question, it's more likely to be Germany, and specifically Wetzlar, home to Leica Camera AG, makers of legendary cameras since Oskar Barnack at Leitz (as Leica was officially called until 1986) came up with the first commercially successful 35mm still camera. Since then, a full century has seen Leica delivering the finest, neatest and most famous imaging devices on the planet: legendary, gorgeous, and considerably expensive.
Its lenses are a key part of the equation. Leica's ability to deliver world-class glass has made its lenses legendary among photographers, and got Leica's cameras on NASA's shortlist for the space race. During John H. Glenn Jr's triple-orbit mission on February 20, 1962, he used a Leica Ig camera to capture the first human-shot colour photographs of the Earth from space.
SUMMARY
Leica Cine 1
Price: $13,999
+ Excellent image quality…
+ …right across the screen
+ Gorgeous box
+ Full TV replacement
+ PVR functions limited; single tuner not triple
+ Price vs competitors
So who better to put their lenses into the projectors that bring bigscreen images back to the home? As Leica puts it, its business is “moving people through imagery,” and the Cine 1 allows it to deliver images to the living room as home entertainment.
Which is perhaps not too much of a departure for the company, if we step back a little in time. Photography has always been a form of home entertainment in itself, and in many 1960s and 1970s homes the biggest available imaging system would have been projection of 35mm transparencies mounted in slides, displayed up on a large square screen so much bigger than any available TV of the day that even the grainy Kodachrome family holiday pictures looked impressive.
Many was the home where this task was trusted to a stylish Leica/Leitz Pradovit slide projector, the height of home projection in its day, complete with a cabled remote control which allowed you to shuttle 35mm slide carousels across a smoky sitting room without even needing to put down the whisky tumbler.
Hence Leica sees the Cine 1 as representing its return to lean-back lounge entertainment.
So welcome to ‘Cinema TV’, an ultra-shortthrow projector with a TV tuner, smart streaming, and a built-in sound system. You can plug in external sources, but the Cine 1 could provide everything you need in one: it's a deliberate alternative to a television.
Not only that, it does so in style, with an instantly iconic exterior, looking functional but gorgeous, like the cameras — though the Cine 1 is four times wider than an SL2, at 60cm in width. The console really is so pretty that even if it did nothing at all we'd be happy to have its silver top surface motoring open and closed on command, that classic central red Leica dot central between its space-age Bauhaus curves. It's just a stunner.
Even the remote control is many cuts above the pack. Here the red Leica dot sits near the bottom, above it a shining silver plane and then not a viewfinder or a flash-gun attachment, but a set of silver buttons, the top left inscribed in dark red with the logo for ‘Netflix’. It's a collision between a classic past and a bold new future. Or Netflix anyway.
Is it also expensive like a Leica? That depends on your point of view. In the consumer AV market the pricing of $13,999 for the 100-inch version and $14,999 for the 120-inch is certainly above any comparable competitor. But in a
