The Home Cinema 4010 and Pro Cinema 4050 are 4K content capable, 1080p pixel shifters. They support HDR (HDR10 standard) and can achieve the new higher standard P3 color – rare for lamp based projectors as pixel shifters hit the screen twice, with overlapping pixels (4M+ pixels.)
By comparison, most of the low cost DLP 4K UHD projectors are also 1080p pixel shifters, but hit the screen four times for 8,000,000 overlapping pixels. For example, the BenQ HT2550 and the Optoma UHD51A have the same native resolution, but pixel shift four times (well it fires once, then fires 3 more times at different locations). Such differences, when looking at sharpness and detail are, at most, very slight. If anything, the usual disadvantage of 3LCD and LCoS projectors compared to DLP is that the three color paths (Red, Green and Blue) are never 100% perfectly in alignment. (Trade-off: By comparison, DLP causes some folks to see rainbows, etc.)
The truth is that each different technology, 3LCD, DLP, and LCoS, have their own advantages and disadvantages. PRO-UHD is the name Epson uses for their suite of 4K capabilities. The DLPs are 4K UHD (UHD of course means Ultra High Definition), while Sony and JVC now both offer a lineup of true, Native 4K projectors; that is to say they have 8.3+ million pixels, with no overlapping pixel shifting. Those however start at $5K and up.
By the way, I’m not a big fan of trademark names it comes to describing technology – the terms are quite convoluted and they all essentially say the same thing (not identical though), while trying to say that a particular manufacturer is the only one with a feature that everyone else offers to some degree or another, often with differences too slight to notice.
For example, when one company describes their technology with “We’re the only company with ‘SuperSmooth’ processing”, is just that – they are the only one with “SuperSmooth,” because that is what they trademarked – but in reality its CFI, just like everyone else has. The only difference is they gave it a name. This has been the running theme among the different manufactures for some years now.
When it comes to Native 4K versus 4K UHD, it is true that if you are not sitting particularly close to your screen, say 15 feet from a 100 inch diagonal screen, you almost certainly can’t tell which is sharper. But the same image at 8 feet, the difference will become much more apparent, with one image appearing slightly sharper than the other. Here’s the kicker though – due to the large amount of image processing that’s going on here, the sharper image may not actually be the one with the higher native resolution.
Bottom line: The Epson, which has some very good optics, appears very sharp on 4K content using pixel shifting. When comparing to other projectors at a similar price point, your final decisions should likely be based on other features, as any perceived sharpness differences will be minor - or not visible at all - depending on how far away you plan on sitting.
