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SubscribeEpson has announced that Formovie Tech, the joint venture between Xiaomi and Appotronics that markets the Formovie Theater UST laser TV projector and others, will vastly revise its brightness claims for its Theater and P1 projector models as part of a settlement to an Epson legal action citing deceptive advertising practices.
Under terms of the settlement, Formovie will restate its brightness spec of the Formovie Theater from an originally claimed 2,800 lumens to 1,800 lumens, a nearly 36% reduction. Formovie had long cited 2,800 ANSI for the projector but at some point began promoting it under the banner of "2,800 Peak Lumens." As part of the settlement, Epson says Formovie has agreed to use the internationally recognized ISO21118 lumens spec for measuring and citing projector brightness going forward.
Also affected by the lawsuit was the Formovie P1, a compact 540p-resolution laser projector that previously claimed 800 lumens of unspecified type but has now been restated to 250 lumens (ISO21118), an approximately 69% reduction.
It's worth noting that the Formovie Theater is an excellent and high value RGB laser UST that won consecutive first prizes in the 2022 and 2023 ProjectorCentral/ProjectorScreen.com Laser TV Showdowns, which were judged each year by a panel of independent projector reviewers and calibrators. The Showdown evaluations were primarily done with samples calibrated for dark-room home theater viewing and did not attempt to assess or measure the maximum brightness for any of the units. In our ProjectorCentral review of the Formovie Theater, our reviewer measured a maximum of 2,940 ANSI lumens, which at the time appeared to verify the spec. However, we often cite in our UST reviews, as we did here, that "readers should be aware that the challenges of measuring brightness on a UST using a handheld luminance meter can result in larger than normal errors, so our measurements should be taken with some grains of salt." Perhaps a full shaker would have been more appropriate given Epson's results, which are typically verified by a third-party lab for purpose of their legal actions.
For its part, Formovie released a blog on its website yesterday titled "Embracing a New Standard: Formovie Transitions to ISO Lumens," where the company explains the perceived benefits of moving to the ISO standard and citing the changes it has made to the Formovie Theater and Formovie P1 specifications.
As we've previously reported, this Epson lawsuit is the latest in what is now a long series of legal actions by Epson intended to rein in rogue marketers making false brightness claims, sometimes for cheap projectors claiming outlandish firepower and sometimes for high quality projectors offered up by respectable manufacturers. Among the brands ensnared in Epson litigations to date are XGIMI, VAVA, Anker, and Wemax, as well as Amazon marketers of inexpensive but often high volume LCD projectors such as AuKing, Vankyo, and RCA.
The use of a universal recognized measurement standard to describe white brightness for all projectors is critical to creating an equal playing field for competitive brands and allowing consumers and businesses to effectively compare the brightness of one projector against another. To date, there have been two primary and largely interchangeable measurement standards widely used by major projector brands, ANSI IT7.228 and ISO21118. ANSI IT7.228 was a long-running standard created by the American National Standards Institute that uses a 9-point averaged measurement technique as described in this article. Essentially the same 9-point methodology was adpoted in the internationally recognized ISO21118 standard from the International Organization for Standardization. ISO21118 is the method endorsed and widely promoted by Epson. Our domestic U.S. ANSI organization also recently endorsed ISO21118, in essence retiring the old ANSI standard.
However, despite claims to the contrary, even a manufacturer's commitment to using and citing ISO21118 lumens is not an ironclad guarantee of an equal platform for all brands and can still lead to misleading brightness claims. One reason is that the ISO standard as written calls for the projector's spec sheet to cite the lumens "as average value of production units," which results in some manufacturers citing a higher ISO number than might appear in a typical single sample subjected to a straight ANSI measurement. Another, more serious problem with the ISO21118 spec is that it allows the release and sale of a production sample that falls as much as 20% below the cited lumen specification while still allowing it to "make spec." This results in some manufacturers marketing a brightness value that is intentionally 10% to 20% higher than what the typical sample will achieve, giving them an unfair advantage over manufacturers who, like Epson, usually make or exceed their claimed brightness spec in our independent testing.
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https://www.projectorcentral.com/LG-HU85LA-4K-UST-Laser-Projector-Review.htm##Measurements,%20Connections
The reason for this is that the extreme angle of the lens on a UST makes it virtually impossible to position a handheld luminance meter at the correct and consistent angle across the screen to insure an accurate reading. Just the tiniest difference in the angle can cause a huge swing in the lux measurement coming off the meter. This is different than with a traditional long-throw projector where you can place the back of the meter to the projection screen or surface and face it into the lens knowing that the light hitting the sensor at any of the nine sectors used for an ANSI lumen reading is positioned for a direct hit and not being interfered with by shadows case by any portion of the meter body surrounding the sensor. Laboratory UST measurements, such as those done by a third-party for Epson for use in their legal actions, utilize a grid of 9 low-profile sensors aligned perfectly with the lens and provide consistent results. And I can assure you that our issues with the handheld approach, and the potential inaccuracies inherent to it, are shared by any other editorial entity that lacks the lab-grade rig I've just described. Unilike our regular long-throw lumen measurements, for which a handheld luminance meter can be counted on to provide reliable measurements, the typical UST measurement with a handheld meter is ultimately a flawed process subject to potentially significant human error.
We were surprised to be so far off of what a lab-grade measurement revealed for the Formovie, and it has engendered internal discussion about how we will handle UST brightness measurements going forward. It is more important to me at this point that we provide readers with accurate information or none at all. In the meantime, other measurements we take for ANSI lumens on traditional long-throw and short-throw projectors can absolutely be counted on as accurate within the limitations of our instrumentation--as long as we properly follow the methodology and formula for calculating the results. You can also count on our measurements for things like input lag and the casual measurements we take for fan noise in our reviewing environments.
