The ultra short throw that actually impressed me at CEDIA

I was at CEDIA Expo in Denver recently, and the projector I’m still thinking about wasn’t one of the reference-grade names. It was AWOL Vision.

We haven’t installed one. This is a booth impression, not a field report. I wrote a few days ago about not trusting trade show demos, immediately before buying a projector because of one, so I know how this sounds.

AWOL knows what they are. They aren’t claiming reference grade and they aren’t trying to go dollar for dollar with the top of the market. They’re a value play with a couple of ideas I haven’t seen anywhere else at the price.

Their ceiling-mounted short throw runs Google TV natively — real app store, the usual streaming apps, Plex. That part isn’t new, and it carries the usual problems. Apps go stale. The processor inside never gets faster.

The part I hadn’t seen: one of the HDMI inputs does eARC. You can run the built-in apps and still push audio out losslessly to a real AVR or processor, and video processing stays on the projector the whole way. Most all-in-one projectors don’t bother.

The ultra short throw is the one I kept walking back to. It sat on a credenza throwing up onto a wall screen, at least 4 HDMI inputs on the back, with enough processing to run all of them at once. The photo above is a football game, 2 soccer matches and a media player, all live at the same time.

High-end AVRs do that. Smart TVs do a version of it. I hadn’t seen a projector do it on its own. There was a Best of Show placard on the credenza next to it, and I don’t think that one was decoration.

Pricing runs from about $2,000 at the bottom of the lineup to about $6,000 for the flagship. The people who review these for a living say AWOL is delivering performance that used to cost considerably more. Nothing on that floor made me doubt it.

I still have no field experience with them, and that changes everything about how much the above is worth. But I want one in a house.