Barco Medea 4K Laser Projector - First Look

[Dylan Seeger]

Barco Medea 4K Laser Projector - First Look
By Dylan Seeger

Seizing on the momentum for high-end home theater and media room installations since COVID, Barco has been beefing up the number of projectors available through their ‘Barco Residential’ distribution channel over the last several years. The obvious appeal here is that these projectors offer luxury performance normally reserved for commercial-grade installs, but with added features and tweaks that make them better suited for home theater installations.

Meet Madea – Barco Residential’s entry-level 4K UHD projector. Based on a custom made laser-phosphor light engine and Pulse electronics platform, Barco says this 6,500 lumen single-chip DLP projector is meant to deliver exceptional performance in small to medium-sized media rooms, or dedicated home theaters with large format projection screens.

Under the hood, Madea uses the latest 0.66” DLP pixel-shifting 4K DMD from Texas Instruments and integrates custom designed aspherical glass elements and enhanced low dispersion glass lenses to deliver razor sharp 4K resolution images on-screen. Ten lens options are available that make Madea fit into pretty much any installation scenario imaginable, ranging from a fixed 0.86:1 short throw ratio lens option, to fully motorized zoom lenses offering throw ratios ranging from 0.80:1 all the way to 6.08:1.

According to Barco, Medea features a brand new laser engine design. Along with significantly improved image uniformity over previous generation models, the blue laser-pumped phosphor light engine used inside offers an incredible 6,500 lumens of light output when set up in its brightest mode. Barco cites up to 40,000 hours of life for the light source depending on setup, meaning owners can expect maintenance-free operation for an incredibly long time. Barco states at least 5 hours of use per day for 11 years before the laser reaches half-brightness.

Madea is built upon Barco’s single step processing Pulse electronics platform, featuring cutting-edge custom-coded FPGA-based video processing. Not only does this give Barco the freedom to design and integrate video processing features as they see fit, the FPGA offers extremely low latency processing. Even with all video processing features enabled, latency is rated for less than 20 milliseconds. Combined with DLP’s excellent pixel response time and motion properties, this makes Medea a great choice for gamers looking to play on the big-screen.

Pulse video processing also allows for a number of commercial-grade features such as four corner warp, embedded warp, edge blending and bow correction that make it easy to seamlessly tie together the images from multiple projectors at once or to correct installation specific screen geometry issues. Barco also claims Medea can be set up in any orientation (360° rotation), thanks in part to a PID-controlled, low noise, liquid cooling system integrated into the chassis.

Other notable features are HDR10 support over HDMI 2.0a, active stereoscopic 3D support (frame packing), HDBaseT HDMI (HDCP 1.4) for extremely long cable runs, and input resolution support up to 4K60p or WQXGA up to 120Hz. Control options range from IR, RS232, TCP/IP, 12v trigger and driver modules that support Crestron, Control4 and Savant control systems.

Setup
At this price level, owners will more than likely have their dealer or a professional calibrator install and set up Medea. However, if you find yourself doing the setup on your own, Barco gives end-users a couple of different options when it comes to how you can interface and set up the projector to one's liking. Unless you have Medea shelf-mounted close to eye level, you’ll likely want to use Barco’s Prospector app to setup and control the projector, as there’s no on-screen display for the menu system. The other option is to use the LCD screen on the side of the projector itself to go through the menus, which could be hard to see if Medea is mounted up high close to the ceiling.

Prospector’s web-based control software provides every configuration option you’ll likely need to setup Medea, such as basic image control, a full color management suite, warping and scaling options, as well as profile memory slots where custom sets of settings can be saved to memory and recalled later depending on the type of content you’re sending. For instance, you can set up profiles for 2D, 3D, SDR and HDR video at various resolutions and aspect ratios, each with custom settings tailor suited to these individual video standards.

Barco’s RealColor P7 color calibration controls offer out-of-the-box preset color modes for REC709, P3 and the native color space of the projector which can further be calibrated to your room and screen material. However, RealColor P7 also allows you to set custom color coordinates for primary and secondary colors, giving installers and calibrators a high level of control over the color reproduction of this projector.

Owners have access to enable or disable BrilliantColor, a Texas Instruments technology which allows the mirrors on the display device to overlap color wheel segments in an effort to boost light output at the expense of absolute color accuracy. While this isn’t a mode I’d recommend using for most content, enabling it gives owners the ability to squeeze more light out of the projector if needed. Additionally, Prospector allows you to set the laser level setting in 1% increments to dial in image brightness to one’s liking.

Warp-to-Center is Medea’s aspect ratio management and scaling solution designed to scale content to keep constant image height on a 2.0:1 or cinemascope aspect ratio screen without the need for an anamorphic lens. For those with an odd-ball aspect ratio screen, you’ll be able to custom set the scaling factor inside the software to match essentially any aspect ratio screen.

Medea is HDR10 compatible and offers owners a static tonemapping solution to tailor suit the image for each installation scenario. In the Advanced PQ submenu within Prospector, you can tell the projector your real-world image brightness, which the projector uses to alter its PQ gamma curve to better represent HDR video at that particular image brightness.

There’s also an HDR Boost option that allows you to amplify or lessen the tone curve created by the projector to subjectively fix potential issues one might encounter from static tonemapping, like an overly dark or washed out appearance in certain movie scenes or to improve the subjectiveness in colors that may appear too little or too greatly saturated. The right setting here depends on how the end user wants the image to look and can also be influenced greatly on a movie-to-movie basis. You’ll want to play with this setting until you find one that suits your preference.

Alternatively, at this projector’s price point, adding in an external video processor, like a Lumagen Radiance Pro or madVR Envy, could be beneficial to squeeze as much performance as possible from the projector and improve the end-user’s experience of using the projector, especially if they plan on watching a lot of HDR. These outboard solutions handle tonemapping automatically and do so by dynamically adjusting the image to each scene, alleviating the need to adjust the manual static tonemapping slider altogether, arguably giving a more consistent HDR image at all times compared to the static tonemapper option built into the projector.

Thoughts on Image Quality
Seeing how I only had a few hours to demo the projector, I was happy to hear that Medea was professionally calibrated prior to my visit so all that was left to do after a few measurements was to sit back and enjoy the image it threw. With the few hours I had with the projector, a lot of what I saw was with it setup in comparison to the Epson QB1000.

As I played back some familiar content, the first thing that stuck out to me was just how detailed and bright its image actually was. Especially compared to the brand new Epson QB1000, which is no slouch on its own, these two qualities stood out the most anytime a comparison was made between the two.

Excellent performance here is thanks to Barco’s commitment to only using state-of-the-art optics and light engine design. Pulling up some torture-test single pixel 4K test patterns confirmed what I was seeing with normal video content. Pixels were well delineated across the entire screen, with it doing an admirable job displaying 4:4:4 chroma resolution and single-pixel information within the limits of what a 4K pixel-shifting DMD can do. In other words, there are few DLP projectors out there currently that can match or best what Medea can put on screen in terms of pure resolution and image sharpness. So if this is an area of performance that is important to you, Medea should be placed high up on your list.

Light output was also very impressive, measuring in at 4,192 lumens with the laser power set to 100% output in the pre-calibrated mode. This means Medea can power massive home theater screens in a dark environment and has the ability to fight ambient light at smaller screen sizes if you plan on using the projector in a mixed-usage media room where you’d be switching from movies in the dark to things like sporting events, cable TV or video games with the lights on in the room.

This quality was in full force when comparing the QB1000 to Medea anytime I had the lights on in the theater. Medea simply looked less washed out, with better subjective color and contrast available to the image compared to the Epson. Tie this in with DLP’s excellent motion handling inherent to the technology and it’s easy to see why this projector would be ideal for media rooms where movie viewing isn’t the only priority. Pairing this projector with an appropriate ALR screen could take things up another step for owners who plan on using this projector with some lights on.

For color, Barco says this projector meets the REC709 standard for gamut coverage. For a single-chip DLP projector using a laser/phosphor light source at this brightness level, this is above average performance. It might not be able to compete with some of the RGB laser competition when it comes to full REC2020 support, but what’s offered will still provide owners with an enjoyable experience without the feeling that colors appear too flat or undersaturated with most video content.

When playing back a few scenes from Inside Out (2015), I found that the shade and tone of colors looked more nuanced and consistent across the entire screen as compared to the QB1000. So despite it not being the most competitive when it comes to color gamut coverage, the colors it did produce appeared to be rendered more accurately to the source.

One area of performance where I thought the QB1000 had a distinct advantage over Medea was in contrast and black level. Barco isn’t performing any miracles here and you’re left with a fairly typical level of contrast DLP that is known for. I measured just under 1000:1 native on/off contrast. This means that, compared to other high contrast display technologies, Medea can leave a little to be desired when it comes to dark movie scene handling, where blacks appear more milky-gray than true black. This should only be an issue if you plan on using Medea in an darkened theater, where Hollywood-style movie viewing will how you'll be using Medea most of the time.

I’ve been using the opening sequence in Dune (2021) over the past few years to test out subjective contrast performance due to its use of high-contrast shots and naturally lit dark interiors that can be a challenge for any display. While Medea did a good job on some of the more high contrast shots where bright and dark elements appear on screen at the same time (above), compared to the QB1000, Medea did look a little more washed out in comparison in extremely dark shots (below).

Medea also lacks any kind of dynamic contrast solution to help improve black level and subjective contrast performance. If you were looking at Medea solely for movie-viewing alone, there are definitely better options out there. With that said, used in more mixed-content situations, where you’d be going from sports to TV, to games, to the occasional movie, Medea still possesses enough contrast with most content to yield a satisfying experience and is where this projector shines. 

Conclusion
After spending a few hours watching content on Madea, it reminded me of why judging a projector solely based on its spec-sheet doesn’t usually tell the whole story. There are a lot of very bright single-chip DLP projectors out there to choose from, but what was clearly evident with my time with Medea was that few of these projectors can match the combination of high brightness, excellent video processing, color nuance and overall optical quality that Medea possesses.

I came away demoing this projector thinking it would be an excellent choice for someone looking to place this in a more mixed usage room, where the owner would want to switch between sports, cable news or video games, sometimes with the lights up, while still offering enough performance for an enjoyable experience with the lights turned down for the occasional movie.

[DLCPhoto]

Thanks for the interesting review Dylan. I had an opportunity to spend some time with a Christie 4K860, a single chip DLP with 8500 lumens, comparing it to my NZ9. So perhaps similar to this Barco, at least in some respects.

With my NZ9 setup, I run at 114 Nits, and with the Christie, I was getting 340 Nits. I have always been curious about those advocating high Nit output for HDR, so this gave me an opportunity to compare.

With bright, well-lit scenes, I found that I really liked the higher brightness of the Christie, but when scenes shifted to anything with darker content, the lower contrast and poorer black levels were immediately apparent, and they really looked bad. I ran both through the Envy, to take DTM out of the picture, and while the improved tone mapping helped the Christie image overall, they obviously couldn't do anything with the black levels.

I configured the Christie to provide the same 114 Nits of my NZ9, which helped black levels, and I actually preferred the overall picture quality of the Christie with reduced light output.

I imagine you saw similar things with the Barco?


I am curious to hear more about the "Warp-to-Center" feature you mentioned. Does this actually detect the black bars, and scale the content accordingly, for a CIH experience, the same as is done by madVR and LRP? Or does this work differently? Does it detect and respond in real-time to AR changes, and if so, how responsive is it? Any other comments on this feature vs the madVR/LRP would be of interest.

[DLCPhoto]

Thanks Dylan - very helpful! That video does a good job of explaining it, so thanks for that.

This makes sense, and I would actually have been shocked if it auto-detected the black bars, knowing how much of a challenge that is!

So yes, the right tool (projector) for the right job is a good approach. The only way to get a no-compromise solution, having all the brightness you want while still maintaining superb black levels, is to spend an insane amount of money on a Christie Eclipse! 

[JoeRod]

We have this Medea available for sale so if you’re interested in joining the Barco club let me know. 

[JoeRod]

And we still have this one for sale. The Medea has a great reputation. Inquire about it today. 

[JoeRod]

If anyone would like to get themselves a great gift this Holiday season the Barco is still available.