We've had native 4k TVs for over 3 years now.

Other than large venue, high light output or extremely high end projectors, we have almost no medium size home theater 4k (native) projectors. Sony being the only exception, that I can think of.

Epson, JVC, none of the big players in the resi home theater market have released anything. Anyone wonder why? Must be some kind of conspiracy.

I am waiting for 4K support from screen manufacturers....

What are the special issues that 4K brings to projection screens?

(I assume when you say "screens" that you don't mean flatscreen TVs.)

To go from 2 million pixels (1080P) to 8 million pixels (4K) is a lot easier to do with a TV that has several square feet of space compared to a projector that has to fit that many more pixels in an area less than a square inch. They can make bigger chips but that requires bigger lenses which increases cost significantly. If they keep the chips the same size they trade off other picture qualities like contrast because smaller pixels means less light.

You will definitely see the E-shift and wobulation types of pseudo 4K become less expensive first. It will take a little while before we see true 4K projectors come down in price. I hope I am wrong.

I was joking.... but I bet GooScreen will start putting "Optimized for 4K" on their bottles.

Simple - lack of content. Maybe the recently released Ultra Blu Ray will spur the projector manufacturers to get moving.

You my friend are a wealth of projector knowledge!

Until there's inexpensive 4K players and a couple thousand titles, who cares.

Or until my eyes can resolve the detail on a 110" screen without sitting 5' from it, who cares?

Well I would argue that you can see the difference easier on a 110" screen at 12' sitting distance than a 50-60" panel at the equivalent (and few sit 6-7' from a 50-60" TV).

But 4K is much more about pixels. It's also about color depth, etc

I don't know how large the Sony SXRD chips are, but it seems that Lcos is where many seem to be going and since JVC and Epson produce lcos, one wonders if there might be a race between those two, or all 3? We can hope.

It can be difficult to get a customer behind the investment of a $5-12k projector if it is not native 4K.

Agreed. They'll spend maybe $3k but anything more and they expect 4K.

TI's new 4K DLP chipset was only just released in January. It will take some time for manufacturers to integrate it within their projector lines. I think you'll see a swarm of new launches in the 3rd and 4th quarter.

Start designing and selling 17x9 custom screens. Until some manufacturer does that automatically you'll have to do it for each sale.

The Sony 4K models use bigger chips than the 1080 models. The 28K model even bigger chips and lenses than the 10-15k 4k models but those are still bigger than the 1080 models.

The new DLP 4K chip use wobulation and not true 4K and fits in their .47" die. They did announce one with .95" die but won't be available until later in the year. DLP has had a true 4K chip for a long time in the commercial projectors but it is 1.4" in size and needs bigger lenses. For reference their small business or cheap HT projectors use .47" chips some even smaller, most of their other HT projectors use .65" chips and the higher end projectors use .95" chips. Bigger chips have larger mirrors which reflect more light giving better contrast. Other technologies LCOS/LCD have their own problems going 4K. JVC has had 4K in their commercial market for a long time too but it is in a monster projector.

Manufacturers want to do 4K with projectors as soon as possible because you capitalize on all the 4K marketing and buzz in the consumer market. Content is starting to come but is still slow. And as stated 4K has a lot of other features like wide color gamut (WCG) and high dynamic range (HDR) that will make even bigger impact in picture quality. With projectors they will accept an HDR signal and apply some processing but displaying true HDR will be difficult and expensive to achieve that per pixel light difference. So going to 4K is not that easy with projectors.

Which my wife hates. The PS on my 2nd gen 720p plasma went out, so I replaced it with a new 1080p LCD. Wife still hates it. She says the picture looks fake and almost like a Mexican soap opera. She has seen 4K in stores and wants no part of it.

I will say that 720p plasma had one of the best pictures of any TV I have ever had. So sometimes color depth is not what everyone wants.