Next week, I’ll pack my bags for Atlanta and head off to the Cedia Expo trade show, which I haven’t attended since 2006. Ostensibly, I’m there to teach a few courses, but I’ll also have my reporter and analyst hats on as I look around to see how the custom residential electronics marketplace has changed over the past three years.

The stock market meltdown that began in December of 2007 and continued through 2008 has impacted the residential construction market like a meteor strike. With new home construction only just starting to get back on its feet and foreclosure rates still high nationwide, it’s easy to assume that 2009 probably won’t turn out be a banner year for Cedia attendees and manufacturers.

But there’s another industry trend that I want to check out in Atlanta. DD readers may recall that the 2006 Cedia show was characterized by a "big bang" of low-cost 3LCD and LCoS home theater projector announcements, all of which stole the thunder from DLP technology and completely changed the playing field for home theater projection.

At that Denver show, Epson, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, and JVC all showed that it was possible to get 1080p resolution, plus color, contrast, and black level performance that rivaled and exceeded the best single-chip DLP projector designs at prices ranging from $3,000 to $6,000. The race only heated up from there, with Sanyo joining the 3LCD fray that fall.

Two recent projector demos brought back memories of that eye-opening trip, and both show that the pendulum may be swinging back the other way. Optoma’s $4,995 HD8200 single-chip DLP projector, which I’ve recently reviewed here, breaks new ground by adopting many of the tricks of the 3LCD and LCoS camps.

Among them are horizontal and vertical lens shift and a long-throw zoom lens, both of which give installers much more leeway in projector placement — not to mention better focus uniformity and lens geometry than the traditional short-throw, vertically offset lenses fitted to DLP projectors. Throw in Anchor Bay’s VRS processor, and you’ve got a serious player in the Cedia channel.

The other projector, which I had a chance to demo this past Friday, is Mitsubishi’s new HC3800 ($1,495). This is also a single-chip DLP design, although it follows the more traditional fixed-offset lens approach. But it has a premium 1.5x zoom lens, anamorphic modes, and a low lamp setting that’s supposed to double normal lamp life. There are also three-level gamma controls and RGBCMY color management settings, something you’d usually see on more expensive models.

I set the HC3800 up in my basement theater to project onto a 92" Da-Lite JFP Affinity screen, using clips from Phantom of the Opera (flesh tones), Speed Racer (color saturation), and The Dark Knight (black levels and low shadow details), using OPPO’s new BDP-83 Blu-ray player as the program source.

I was very impressed with the quality of images I saw, even with a ‘quickie’ calibration. Colors popped, flesh tones looked great, and images had lots of contrast and dynamic range. Yes, black levels could have been better, and they do remain a challenge for many DLP projectors. But the HC3800’s level of performance would have easily set you back $7,000 to $10,000 just three years ago. That’s how much the playing field has changed!

So what constitutes a "high-end" home theater projector these days? Sure, you can still spend five figures and get a three-chip DLP chassis with a xenon lamp, if you have both the money and desire.

But it’s pretty clear that you can also get great performance for well under $5,000, using any of the competing technologies and a high-quality screen. And do-it-yourselfers, whom the HC3800 is clearly targeting, are going to become an increasingly bigger factor in the home theater projection marketplace.

There is one casualty of this market trend. James Chan, who runs the projector business for Mitsubishi, told me during his visit that Mitsubishi will no longer manufacture 720p models using DLP or LCD technology — it’s 1080p all the way, going forward. By this time next year, I suspect the rest of the manufacturers of home theater projectors will be writing a similar epitaph.

The echoes haven’t died down yet!