Screeneo Innovation SA, the Philips licensee that manufactures and markets portable projectors under the Philips Screeneo brand, along with the U.S.-based Philips North America LLC, have announced they have reached agreement with Epson North America to use an industry-standard ANSI-lumen equivalent for specifiying and marketing future projector models.

According to Epson, the agreement, announced by Philips earlier this year, calls for all current and future Philips branded projectors sold in the U.S. to specify ISO21118 lumens in product packaging and advertising. The ISO21118 brightness measurement calls for the same 9-point averaged technique used for the predecessor ANSI-lumen specification that is still cited by most projector brands for marketing purposes and allows fair comparisons among products from different manufacturers. ISO21118 standards are defined in the Information Display Measurement Standards (IDMS), a comprehensive 563-page document and widely respected source published by the International Committee for Display Metrology (ICDM).
To date, Philips Screeneo and Philips NeoPix projector specs have mostly cited LED Lumens or "Color Lumens." LED lumens, as described here, attempt to account for the belief that the eye perceives saturated LED colors as having higher brightness that is not reflected in ANSI measurements from traditional luminance meters. LED lumens usually reflect what the manufacturer claims is an ANSI equivalent that would be measured if the projector used a lamp. However, there is no accepted industry standard for making this conversion, and few manufacturers cite either the real ANSI measurement or the calculation used to arrive at the LED lumen spec.

This latest announcement follows a series of actions taken by Epson to reign in the practices of projector marketers accused of either directly claiming inflated ANSI brightness specifications or citing deliberately confusing and meaningless units of measurement such as "Lux" to make their projectors appear to be brighter than ANSI-rated models. Furthermore, Epson's ongoing promotion of CLO Color Brightness measurements alongside ANSI/ISO white brightness as an advantage of its three-chip 3LCD approach over single-chip DLP technology may have made the company particularly sensitive to Philip's use of the Color Lumens terminology.