The One

Upgrade Your Home Theater With a Projector That Brings the Noise

Optoma’s CinemaX line comes with built-in speakers that will rattle your windows—but not the picture.

The Optoma CinemaX P1

Photographer: Janelle Jones for Bloomberg Businessweek

Unless you’re heading to a drive-in theater, it’s abundantly clear that if you want to see a movie on a big screen in the coming months, you’ll probably have to do it yourself. The simplest solution is an all-in-one ultrashort-throw projector. Rather than being mounted across the room on the ceiling, as most standard models require, the $3,699 CinemaX P1 (pictured) and the new $3,299 CinemaX P2, both from Taiwan-based Optoma Corp., can sit seven inches from the wall and cast a clear image that measures more than seven feet diagonally, from corner to corner. Both max out at 120 inches. The difference is the P1’s integrated 40-watt NuForce sound bar, which renders clear dialogue while packing enough volume into every explosion to rattle the windows—but not the picture.

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