Leica hopped in on the laser projector category back in 2022, releasing the releasing the premium Cine 1 ultra-short throw projector. They followed it up with a couple more models the last few years. This time around, they’re releasing their smallest laser projector yet in the form of the Leica Cine Compact 1.
Designed for portable use around the house, the device is significantly smaller and lighter than the outfit’s previous releases. It’s also not meant to mount on a fixed floor stand like those models. Instead, it’s designed to rotate on its stand, which can be set down on any table, allowing you to tilt the projector to focus its beam across different angles, similar to the current crop of portable ceiling projectors that have become popular today.
The Leica Cine Compact 1 combines a triple RGB laser light source, a Leica Summicron zoom lens with aspherical elements, and a 0.5-inch DMD image chip, along with the outfit’s proprietary image processing technology, Leica Image Optimization (LIO). This setup allows it to beam 4K/60Hz images onto any projection surface at sizes of up to 220 inches, so you can enjoy theater-like big screens from the comfort of your home. The projector covers 100 percent of the BT.2020 color gamut, achieves a maximum brightness of 1,700 lumens, and offers a 1500:1 native contrast ratio, while offering support for Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and HLG content, so you should be able to watch most video content at their best quality.
Like many compact projectors today, it can rotate 360 degrees, allowing you to easily beam images to the ceiling, towards the floor, and at, pretty much, any other angle. It doesn’t seem to be designed for portability, though, since there’s no carry handle, although it does look compact enough to easily move around the house.
The Leica Cine Compact 1 actually comes with a gimbal at the base, ensuring it can level itself regardless of your placement, complete with autofocus, automatic keystone correction, and intelligent screen resizing, minimizing the need to fiddle with the settings, allowing you to just plug, play, and sit back, letting the projector do all the work. It also offers optical zoom up to 1.3x, so you can blow up elements in the scene for whatever joy it brings your way. There’s built-in audio, too, specifically a 20W stereo sound system with support for Dolby Digital Plus and DTS Virtual:X.
Prefer to feed the sound to your soundbar? Not a problem, as you can plug into the multiple available ports, as well as pair it over Bluetooth for wireless connectivity. It runs the VIDAA operating system, which connects to your network over Wi-Fi, so you can stream movies and shows without having to plug in a separate media source. The platform is compatible with, pretty much, any popular streaming platform out there for direct access to services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus. There’s also a Game Mode setting, which boosts the framerate to 240Hz at 2K resolution, with a rated latency of 20 milliseconds.
The Leica Cine Compact 1 comes out June 18th, priced at $1,995.
