CES is mainly a showcase of new technologies, and Samsung seems to want to impress us with its new projectors. The Freestyle, the company’s portable projector that debuted last year, managed to impress by integrating an entire Smart TV inside, and this year it gets even smarter software that can, for the first time, provide connectivity between two projectors without much effort on the part of users. So you can have a 21:9 aspect ratio projection with dual resolution.
The new generation Freestyle comes with advanced software features such as game streaming and synchronisation of two projectors
The new generation The Freestyle doesn’t look much different on the outside, but it does seriously upgrade the software component. On the one hand, the new interface also integrates for the first time the Gaming Hub, the gaming area we first saw last year on Samsung TVs, which allows streaming from services like Xbox Cloud Gaming, GeForce Now and Amazon Luna directly to the device.
Then, the new The Freestyle include something called Edge Blending. So if you have two Freestyles on hand, they can be automatically linked together to provide a single synchronised projection. Samsung demonstrated two types of Edge Blending, one horizontal and one vertical. So you can combine the image from the two projectors into either a single image with an ultra-wide, 21:9 aspect ratio similar to cinema movies, or you can achieve a nearly square projection with a 16:15 aspect ratio.
The projectors, however, use AI algorithms to detect the other projector’s image and intelligently crop the image so there’s no overlap. What’s more, the image also adjusts automatically depending on the projection angle, via automatic keystone capabilities.
It’s hard to guess who this feature is made for, as projectors are not exactly affordable or popular devices among technology users. It’s hard to usually find a projector user, let alone one who owns two. Presumably Samsung feels that with the portable nature of the Freestyle, two friends who each own one could bring them to a game night or movie night to enhance the viewing experience. Whatever the case, Samsung’s proposed technology is impressive.