Sharp/NEC 🇯🇵

📍 Tokyo, Japan

🏢 Founded 2020

🌍 Digital Signage & Installation Projection

Overview Innovations Products Applications FAQs Resources

Company Overview

In 2020, two of the most legendary, historic titans of the Japanese display industry—Sharp Corporation and NEC Display Solutions—entered a massive joint venture, eventually resulting in Sharp fully acquiring NEC’s display business. This created Sharp/NEC Display Solutions, an absolute juggernaut in the global ProAV, digital signage, and enterprise projection space.

NEC’s historic legacy in projection is built on absolute, unyielding reliability. They are the projectors chosen by massive universities, airport terminals, and federal governments who require devices to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for years without a single point of failure. Sharp brings massive manufacturing scale and advanced 8K display technologies to the partnership.

Together, Sharp/NEC offers an incredibly vast portfolio. They manufacture everything from silent, whisper-quiet laser projectors for intimate corporate boardrooms to massive, DCI-compliant 35,000-lumen digital cinema projectors used in premium Hollywood movie theaters globally.

Core Technologies

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Whisper-Quiet Cooling

NEC is famous for engineering a patented sealed LCD cooling system. By isolating the light engine, they eliminated the need for massive, noisy fans, resulting in 10,000-lumen projectors that are virtually silent in a boardroom.

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Digital Cinema Dominance

NEC is one of only three companies in the world (alongside Barco and Christie) licensed to manufacture DCI-compliant digital cinema projectors, providing the laser engines that power thousands of commercial movie theaters.

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ActiveScene Technology

A massive innovation combining projection with switchable smart glass. A retail storefront window can be perfectly transparent one minute, and instantly turn opaque to become a massive high-definition projection screen the next.

Featured Solutions

32 sq/ft ActiveScene Solution

Stunning rear projection solution designed to transform standard glass into new creative marketing messages. Ideal for new applications such as digital signage, branding and privacy. Designed for spaces requiring up to 48 sq/ft of image.

60 sq/ft ActiveScene Solution

Digital Cinema Laser Projector

Laser light source ensures no black screen. Approximately 20,000 hours of expected usage. 3D content utilizes the projector’s full 2K resolution and triple flash technology for smooth motion.

Ideal Industry Deployments

✈️ Airport Digital Signage

🏫 Higher Education Campuses

🍿 Commercial Multiplex Cinemas

🛍️ Retail Active Window Displays

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens if a laser projector ‘fails’ during a movie?

Sharp/NEC’s digital cinema laser projectors use massive banks of redundant laser diodes. If one single laser diode fails during a Hollywood screening, the screen will not go black. The image just gets imperceptibly dimmer, ensuring the show goes on.

Why are NEC projectors so popular in higher education?

Universities heavily prioritize ‘Total Cost of Ownership’ (TCO). NEC’s filter-free, sealed laser designs mean the university’s IT staff never has to climb a ladder to clean a dust filter or change a bulb for 20,000 hours, saving massive labor costs.

What is NaViSet Administrator 2?

It is Sharp/NEC’s highly advanced network software. It allows an IT director to look at a single dashboard and see the health, temperature, and power status of every single NEC projector and LCD screen across an entire global corporate network.