Advanced Features are Built into Christie’s New J Series
Quick Bio
Name: George Tsintzouras
Title: Senior Director of Product Management, Business Products
Company: Christie Digital
Driving Innovation: Christie continually stays at the forefront of trends by staying in touch with customers and partners to see what challenges they come up with and where they need help. Christie’s goal is to solve these issues and bring compelling solutions.
What is your position and what does it entail?
Business Products is the largest group (of three) in the company. It handles marketplaces from staging and rental to boardrooms, and education. As a DLP product manager, my job is to bring display solutions to the markets we serve. Display solutions covers a lot of stuff, from high brightness, three-chip DLP products to 3D products to single chip boardroom projectors.
I’ve been doing this about five years, but I’ve been with Christie for 12 years. I was with Electrohome, which got bought out by Christie. Electrohome is an almost 100-year-old company doing displays and projections. They joined the two teams in 1999 and ever since then we’ve been doing fairly well.
(Above) The balconied Royal Court Theatre aboard the Queen Mary 2 cruise ship is indicative of the installations the new J Series is designed for, and features two Roadster HD18K projectors, which the J Series is replacing. As of press time, customers were just receiving their orders and new installation photos were not yet available. (Right) Christie’s J Series is a high-end projection solution targeted at larger venues.
How did Christie get its start?
Christie started in film projectors in the early 1900s. Christie out of the U.S. was doing cinema projectors and baluns and lamp housings. And Electrohome, up in Canada, was doing all sorts of technology— everything from radio to TV sets in wooden cabinets. Then they transitioned into doing the first projectors out of the CRT tubes. They made the first LCD projector that was 1,000 lumens. They were the first to make DLP projectors by partnering up with Texas Instruments.
What is the newest innovation/product from Christie, and how is it different from other such products in its category?
The J Series projector. Basically, the J series projector is a very highend projection solution, really targeted at some of the larger venues and some of the types of job functions that are required by people that do rental and staging. So these aren’t simple little projectors that sit on a desk in a boardroom. These are absolute, rugged workhorses. One of the requirements in these sorts of markets are that these things are not only rugged, but are also small and super bright. So one of the things that we do very well is our efficiency. If you look at our projectors, they’re the brightest projectors in the market today. And if you take a step back and look a little closer, you’ll also see that they’re the smallest projectors in those categories.
On top of our efficiency and our expertise in that area, one of the other things we’ve done is invented very high-end features. The ability to map onto complex surfaces and do warping, we’ve included this all standard. This is known as Christie Twist, and in the past, this was something you added on.
One other thing this platform does is enable people a full upgrade path to 3D.
