Projector manufacturer Barco showed its first commercially available 6P laser-illuminated projector at CinemaCon 2014. It is the first DCI-compliant laser projector that is capable of showing 4K content at 60 fps and 3D movies in full 4K resolution. Barco will be installing its first 4K commercial laser projectors in the US and China during Q2 2014 and throughout the rest of the world in Q4 2014.

The laser projector comes with Barco’s next generation projector electronics – Barco
Alchemy technology – also released at CinemaCon – which enables 4K HFR content to be displayed at 60 fps as well as 4K 3D content. The new laser projector can replace a dual-stacked setup of xenon-based DCI projectors and offer double 3D brightness in Color3D,
while reducing energy levels by 40%, and also eliminates the need to align and maintain two projectors.

The projector overcomes another hurdle of earlier laser projectors – the  ability to minimize speckle – even on silver screens – eliminating the need for a mechanical screen-vibrating system to achieve the desired image quality. Designed from the ground up, the Barco 6P laser projector features a fully integrated system with unified laser light sources
that are housed inside the projector, which Barco touts as having better durability and system efficiency than previous fiber-coupled technologies.

Analyst firm PMA Research has been following the Digital Cinema market since it’s inception. Early – adopters of digital cinema technology are poised to make upgrades to their installed base of theater projectors, and the cutting-edge laser technology will overcome several issues, such as movie-goer complaints that 3D movie viewing has been too dark.