Dangbei, the Chinese electronics brand that’s mostly known for its innovative portable projector models like the Freedo and the N2 Mini, is upping the stakes with the debut of its home theatre-grade S7 Ultra Pro. It’s touting some very serious specifications at what’s likely to be a very reasonable price.
The Dangbei S7 Ultra Pro was announced in China last week and it delivers native 4K images with an extremely high brightness of 4,500 CVIA lumens, making it more than suitable for daytime viewing. Indeed, the company claims that it will “maintain clear image visibility” in any lighting conditions, making it ideal for any environment.
Dangbei is positioning the S7 Ultra Pro as a premium home cinema projector, featuring a professional-grade polarised light-control engine that enhances optical efficiency by 10%, and light throughput by an impressive 168%. In addition, there’s a Master Gold Ring lens fitted onto the device, which boasts “cinema-level resolving power” to help sharpen images and ensure every detail is crystal-clear.
It’s powered by MediaTek’s most advanced MT9681 chipset, and comes with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage space. To keep things cool, there’s a liquid-cooling system that’s said to improve heat dissipation efficiency by 50% compared to earlier models.
The company also said the S7 Ultra Pro features the world’s first “eight-layer light-dispersion module”, which is a technology that’s able to reduce “laser speckle” by 99.999% to help clean up the visuals even more. Laser speckle refers to the interference patterns that are created by projectors when their laser light is scattered by a rough or uneven surface, resulting in the seemingly random distribution of bright and dark spots. It’s caused by the overlapping of light waves that interfere with each other, producing variations in intensity, and the eight-layer light-dispersion module is designed to fix this.
Other features include a 0.98-1.6:1 optical zoom that allows for flexible image sizes of up to 300-inches, without any loss of detail. Users can place the S7 Ultra Pro at a distance of less than three metres from the wall or projection screen to get an 80-inch picture, or 7.5 metres away to obtain the maximum image size.
The native contrast ratio is 8,000:1, with dynamic contrast rated at 65,000:1 thanks to the company’s Dynamic Light-Control algorithm. Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10 and HDR Vivid are all supported.
Dangbei said the Chinese model runs the Dangbei Super AI OS 6.0 software, which is a homegrown operating system that integrates multiple large language models to enable far-field voice commands, gesture control and light-tracking pointer navigation. Outside of China, Dangebi’s projectors usually run the Google TV operating system, so we expect that will be the case when it launches the S7 Ultra Pro globally.
To keep things cool, there’s a liquid-cooling system that’s said to improve heat dissipation efficiency by 50% compared to earlier models.
One thing Dangbei hasn’t yet revealed is the asking price, but we don’t expect it to be that expensive. As powerful as it is, the S7 Ultra Pro is not the most advanced projector in the company’s current lineup. Rather, it sits below the flagship Dangbei S7 Ultra Max, which cranks up the brightness to an astonishing 5,800 lumens and has superior dynamic contrast of 150,000:1.
The Dangbei S7 Ultra Pro is yet to launch globally, but it’s available on the Chinese retailer JD.com for 12,499 yuan (around £1,310). It's expected to go on sale internationally before the end of the year. It will compete with rival Chinese brand Xgimi’s new models, including the Xgimi Horizon 20 Max, which delivers a whopping 5,700 lumens of brightness.
