anyone see a way around this? (viewsonic ve150m / Sharp QA-1000)

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I pulled apart a viewsonic ve150m the other day and encountered this ...

http://geocities.com/j4jes/projector

Just when I thought I had learned from my first mistake I went out and bought a Sharp qa-1000 projector panel which says in it's manual it can do "true color" at 640x480 which by way of wikipedia definition is 16,777,216 colors for each pixel, but I am lucky if I'm getting EGA (16 colors!). Is this something to do with the pinout of the cable? Anyone??
 
use the viewsonic

15" LCD panels have MUCH better performance in terms of speed and contrast ratio, compared to older projection panels.

That Flat Flexible Cable joining the two driver boards is found in almost every 15" or greater LCD made. All you need is an FFC extender. You can make one for <$10 US, by ordering the right parts from Digikey, Mouser, or Lumenlab. Very easy, no soldering required!

Search for "FFC extender", "FFC cable", etc. with the forum search button to find threads that describe the parts you need, how to connecte them, etc.
 
Thanks, I found this threadthread and ordered the same two components on mouser.com COD. I can't wait to get this working because as you said it will kick any projection panel's a$s at 1024x768 or atleist it's way better than the problematic qa-1000 by sharp. I should have known it was restricted to 256 colours when I saw the 26pin mcga to vga connector. Wikipedia confirms the extent of this graphics standard was 256 colors or less. Doh!
 
Some great news.. The two parts I ordered on mouser.com arrived today, and despite having a heck of a time jamming the two ends of the 20p molex cable together in the zif top, it works! Now if only my old 3M 213 overhead were a bit brighter with a larger aperture size. The outside edges of the projected picture are dark and I can't help but think that a 14" or 13" lcd screen would be better when this 15" has so much hanging over the 10.5 x 10.5" standard aperture area of the projector. My ATI card won't let me shrink the picture in the display properties either. Maybe I can find a utility that will resize the image accordingly ..
 
fine for watching video

If you want to run windows on it, then it could be a problem. But video is another matter: TVs overscan horizontally about 25%, so you don't see 12.5% of the image on either size. LCDs don't overscan at all.

The net result is that your 12" wide LCD clipped by a 10.5" OHP stage may actually show you MORE than a TV, viewing the same source material. Try it and see.

But this is why people build their own projector. Just by using the OHP parts in a new box with wider fresnels, you could see the whole image. Then the difference is very noticable. It is almost like watching a widescreen TV, even with a standard 1024 by 768 LCD.
 
http://entechtaiwan.net/util/ps.shtm

some of the newer builds of powerstrip have overscan tuning abilities

What I think may be possible is tricking the computer into drawing on 10% less of the screen and turning off the excess pixels. This way you end up with 900 pixels by 650 pixels.

A lot of newer notebooks have this feature for legacy support. This is done so a 640x480 pixel image isn't scretched onto a 1600x1000 pixel mess.
 
we don't want your crummy 2k$ projectors

this is true, I remember my old NEC versa notebook used to do this in vga mode where it was surrounded by black borders. I tried this with the viewsonic panel I am using and it i can't find a setting to make it resort to the legacy, it's always full screen. My next attempt at this will be to install this Scitech Display Doctor program, I think it will have the sizing / positioning options i am looking for since ATI's catalyst drivers don't seem to shrink the image quite nearly enough. It actually installs it's own driver to make the necesarry communication between windows and the manufacturer's drivers.

I remember some of my old integrated SIS video cards had this sizing / positioning feature and it worked quite well, but this was of course on an old CRT. The OCD on these newer LCD's are often missing the luxury of crt-like vertical / horizontal sizing options (only positioning available sometimes!) I'm sure someone using an LCD / overhead projector combination has discovered how to do this.. it's really just an argument about what is less detrimental; the lost pixels due to the 15" lcd overhang on the projector , or the lost pixels due to resizing the display to the 10.5" projector aperture to something like 700x960 (sharper image vs fitting entire shot of movie)
 
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