Leica Cine Play 1 Review: Pricey but Worth Every Penny | WIRED

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Rating:9/10

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WIRED

Leica’s Summicron lens renders colors beautifully. Compact size allows for flexibility in moving around the home. Straightforward setup; auto-sizing and focus were almost magical.

TIRED

Looks best in a dark room. Remote has a confusing button layout. Expensive.

If your preference is to make colors pop on the screen for movie night, the Leica Cine Play 1 delivers with an immersive cinematic experience. This short-throw laser projector from the company that makes high-end cameras with a cult following ticks almost every box for tack-sharp picture quality, rendering Pixar films and the Avatar series with vibrant colors and beautiful details.

Crafted out of aluminum and glass, Leica's latest projector borrows many of its design ethos and superb build quality from the company’s cameras. It comes with a carrying handle, making it easy to move around the home, and is powered by the intuitive VIDAA operating system. The Leica optical performance makes movies come alive.

At $2,995 after an $800 rebate, the Cine Play 1 is competitive with midrange home cinema projectors from Sony, Epson, and others. The only minor ding against the Cine Play 1 is that you’ll need a mostly dark room to take advantage of Leica’s brilliant color reproduction, while competitors like the Epson Pro Cinema LS9000 perform well in both dark and well-lit environments.

Setting Up the Projector

The Cine Play 1 uses a Leica Summicron lens with an outstanding optical zoom. Known for its extreme sharpness and near-zero color fringing on Leica’s storied cameras, the Summicron glass delivers similar benefits on the Cine Play 1. With the Cine Play 1, it’s like having a high-end camera that, instead of capturing a scene, projects one with added vibrancy. Though Leica has made optical lenses for other projectors, this partnership with Hisense makes this the first projector to bear Leica’s branding, complete with the iconic red dot on the top.

Photograph: John Brandon

Though seemingly mobile at about the size of a large lunch box and weighing 14.6 pounds, the lack of a built-in battery means that the Cine Play 1 is mostly confined to indoor use. Like most other projectors, you can mount the Cine Play 1 on your own stand or opt for Leica’s optional $495 Cine Play 1 Floor Stand. Though expensive, the Floor Stand has an ingenious design that is Apple-like in approach. After mounting the projector to the stand with a couple of bolts, I noticed a proprietary connection, allowing you to connect the power cord into the base of the stand rather than on the rear of the Cine Play 1, solving the problem of unwieldy wires.

After mounting the Cine Play 1, I set up the projector roughly 12 feet from the wall. This resulted in a 150-inch image. The Cine Play 1 can project 65- to 300-inch images, but for smaller picture sizes, it would be easier to get a 4K TV instead. No matter how large the projection I was testing, the focus, brightness, and color quality were all above average compared to other projectors.

The auto keystone and autofocus features were almost magical, adjusting to my projector screen automatically. I did have to turn off the auto-adjusting after bumping into the projector a few times, but the idea is that it will adjust if you move the Cine Play 1 to a different room.

Photograph: John Brandon

Powering on the Cine Play 1, I was pleasantly surprised at how vibrant and colorful everything looked in a dark room.

The onscreen setup took only a few minutes. The Cine Play 1 uses Hisense’s VIDAA operating system, so I created a new profile and logged into the companion app. At the top of the screen, there’s a series of banners that allow you to access the app store, art mode, and scan a QR code to install the mobile app. I found the OS to be highly intuitive. There’s also a highly effective voice search option if you would rather not rely on the included remote.

VIDAA provides access to most streaming services, with Fandango at Home being a notable exception. (Leica reps stated that they may add this service at a later date.)

Benchmark Results and First Impressions

Apart from minor brightness issues when using the Cine Play 1 in brighter environments, this projector passed my benchmark tests. Colors were vibrant, skin tones did not appear washed out, and a butterfly scene showed subtle differences between the shades of yellows and oranges in my test clips. In comparison, colors on the TCL NXTVISION were noticeably duller. The Cine Play 1 also excels as a gaming display, with superb color reproduction and stutter-free performance when tested with Crimson Desert paired with Acer's Nitro 60 gaming desktop.

I found that the Cine Play 1 works fine during the day, but perf