Back from Star Wars in DLP - home projector questions... (1 Viewer)

[Michael Botvinick]

I saw the film here in S. Calif. My brother and I went and he is a Phd that has been working with the chips from TI for a long time. I am very particular with my image quality. The text was a little blurry around the edges.

Otherwise, the picture was amazing! The projector used here handled the Black no problem (makes sense since it was a three chip). I also saw the film in a regular theater.

If you can, try to catch it digital. It is worth the experience.

 

[James Bergeron]

For those that do not know you can pick up some VERY decent CRT projectors that will blow away current DLP's for around $2K - $5K.

I picked up an electrohome in prestine condition for $2500 US.

The only advantage digital has is it's convinience and size. once you get the crt on the ceiling and out of the way and setup though, it's marvelous!

 

[Gabriel_Lam]

The only advantage digital has is it's convinience and size. once you get the crt on the ceiling and out of the way and setup though, it's marvelous!

Actually, other advantages of digital are:

1. If you don't live in a cave, you can still get a decent image. Total darkness is unnecessary. Thus, superbowl parties are ok.

2. You can have a large screen and a pretty wide angle of viewing for cheap. If you want 16+ ft lamberts on a 144" or bigger screen (which isn't really that large) with a reasonable viewing angle on a CRT machine, you're going to need a 12" CRT like the BarcoReality 912.

3. Parts are more readily available for digital, and are cheaper. Plus, the way the industry is going, it'll become more and more so this way.

 

[Dean McManis]

I went to see EPII tonight in a DLP theater.

WOW! What a roller coaster ride.

I sat in the first third of the theater, about 20' away from a 60' wide screen, and I'll admit that I could visibly see pixels on the title text and high contrast light/dark edges.

I hadn't seen this with the last four DLP movies that I had watched (at a different theater), but they were smaller 40' wide screens there, and they had shown 1.78/1.85 format movies.

But what was great was the lack of jitter, the visibly brighter picture, the image detail (like HDTV at home), the great color and contrast.

My friends had seen EPII a week ago on film and they said that the film version was visibly dimmer and softer, lacking the picture detail of this DLP presentation.

The pixels weren't noticable in most scenes even when you were looking for them, but there was some slight horizontal panning micro-jitter in a couple scenery shots.

It was a day and night improvement over a regular film that I had seen yesterday with it's blurry edging, and relatively dim picture. And the black level was about the same as yesterday's film show. Not solid black, but decent.

So I'll agree that it's not perfect yet, and that a large 60' wide screen would need the QXGA D-ILA projector (4X DLP resolution)to do it full digital justice. But I bet it looked pretty stunning in the rear 3rd of the theater.

And I'm excited to think that EPII will be coming to DVD before Christmas this year.

-Dean.

 

[Michael Eiche]

I've seen the film at a DLP cinema here in Richmond B.C. Overall we were disappointed in the image quality. The biggest issue was either a soft focus or lack of resolution. It just didn't look sharp. In addition we noted the poor black level as others have mentioned.

 

[Alan Batie]

If you can't wait for another generation or two, I would recommend the Sharp XV-Z9000U. Although it lists for around $10K, they seem to be going on ebay for $5-6K. A friend and I went to a couple of local stores to see what kind of image they threw and were quite impressed --- it's still a little pixelated, but it's the best image I've seen yet out of a consumer digital projector. It has a native 1280x720 resolution; personally, I'm waiting for 1920x1080 though.