I am in <b>AWE</b>. Forgive me, i realize this is a forum with some young people, myself relatively included, but holy ****.
It took over a month for my ViewSonic vg150 to get here. Abso-freaking-lutely forever, slightly over a month. Projector was here after a week and a half, and I've been waiting ever since for the the forsaken LCD to get here. Well, it finally showed up Monday.
I put the thing together yesterday, just racing through plans and mad jury rigging. A squirrel cage fan, refridgerator fan, a couple lego bricks, two stands and two whole rolls of duct tape later (plus a whole lot of work), and the things together. Completely beautiful.
I pretty much just disected the LCD monitor, and ripped out the matrix and the control circuitry. I have legos duct-taped down around the perimitere of the projector, elevating the lcd matrix a little over half an inch above the projector surface. I knew I needed some airflow, i so scounged around and found a pretty nice fan intended for a bathroom ceiling. pretty nice CFM, and relatively queit, especially considering what its pushing.
The thing overheated almost instantly. It was almost singingly hot to use. but it looked freaking awsome. amazing, already, and i hadnt even started tweaking. definately knew i couldnt be stopped, right then and there.
I had a cheezit box lying around, so I sliced off one of the sides and used it to duct the airflow from the squirrel cage fan to under the LCD. That should work to keep it cool, but there was still a HUGe heat problem.
I realized the projector was scorching hot. It's got a 575 watt hetal halide stage light causing there to be a world of burning and heat and stuff like that in that little black metal projector. it was way hotter in that black box than it had any right to ever be.
Flaw one is that it just has a single fan in the box. Flaw two is that the box had no airtake. Flaw three is that the fan barely spun. Added some oil to the fan, and masking taped a side up. Found a random fan from a refridgerator just lying around, so I traced a circle a little bigger than that (using a compass) on the masking, and broke out the jig-saw. Drilled some holes and bolted the fan down. The wiring inside the box is hard to get to, so I just put a 120v line on the fan and called it a night. Woulda been nice to do a decent job, but man, i was minutes away from completion.
I reassembled everything, duct taping the legos down to the side of the projector, placing the panel gingerly down on top. Taped the two stands the whole monstrosity sits on back together and realigned the cheeze-it airflow deviceto keep the LCD cool. Taped everything down into place. Attached the control circuitry for the LCD "safely enough" and started plugging things in (2 fans, 1 LCD and 1 projetor).
Its been running ever since.
Dad brought back the $200 heat scanner today. 102 degrees at the hottest, after over 12 hours of use. Most of the LCD's right around 95, which is perfectly fine for it.
The image is great. We'll start with the bad. Unfortunately, the LCD's a bit bigger than the projector, so I'm missing some of the screen. To worsen things, because i have to elevate the panel, i get even less of the screen visible. By moving and rescaling DScaler and PowerDVD, we can perfect our viewing area, so the image we want appears perfectly on the screen, but its not as sharp as it could be, since were not using all the pixesl.
The image is a bit over 800 x 600 pixels visible, which is still a whole, a certifiable shitload oh pixels. I would <b>definately</b>like more, but i can live. Besides, the s-video source thats got the PS2 plugged into it isnt even 800x600 in quality, its already stretching.
I might almost say the 350:1 contrast ratio of the VG150 makes it LESS suited to this job, as evident in gran turismo 3 in Smokey Mountains, where you have some uber high contrast scenes, jumping from brightly lite mountain side to darkened forest paths. If you've got a fairly constant light balance game or movie, you can tweak you gamma settings perfectly, to any game, but things that change frequently are harder to fine tune. You can software reduce contrast ratio, but its just not the same thing. I initially bought the high contrast ratio system thinking the highest contrast system i could find would be best suited to having a 17,000 lumen bulb shown through it, but it turns out that its actually possibly overkill.
But regardless of those things, i'm still in totally new world. This is unlike anything i've ever seen before.. I can have lights on, and the image is still clearly visible, its so bright. Not a dream of a concern about brightness. You can get some really amazing colors making up some pretty amazing scenes. Widescreen is the greatest creation ever.. My friends are playing Grand Theft Auto right now, and i cant seem to stop the drool that keeps rolling off my lips. This is the best $350 I've ever spent in my entire life, without any quesiton.
What i'd really like right now are three things. One, a photoshop style Curves for brightness, two, a way to have presets with it, and three, a way to run a resolution something like 824 by 755 using the pixels at the center of my screen.
gonna start playing with powerstrip now in hopes of added tweaking. if anyone knows any other tools, i'd be appreciated.
It took over a month for my ViewSonic vg150 to get here. Abso-freaking-lutely forever, slightly over a month. Projector was here after a week and a half, and I've been waiting ever since for the the forsaken LCD to get here. Well, it finally showed up Monday.
I put the thing together yesterday, just racing through plans and mad jury rigging. A squirrel cage fan, refridgerator fan, a couple lego bricks, two stands and two whole rolls of duct tape later (plus a whole lot of work), and the things together. Completely beautiful.
I pretty much just disected the LCD monitor, and ripped out the matrix and the control circuitry. I have legos duct-taped down around the perimitere of the projector, elevating the lcd matrix a little over half an inch above the projector surface. I knew I needed some airflow, i so scounged around and found a pretty nice fan intended for a bathroom ceiling. pretty nice CFM, and relatively queit, especially considering what its pushing.
The thing overheated almost instantly. It was almost singingly hot to use. but it looked freaking awsome. amazing, already, and i hadnt even started tweaking. definately knew i couldnt be stopped, right then and there.
I had a cheezit box lying around, so I sliced off one of the sides and used it to duct the airflow from the squirrel cage fan to under the LCD. That should work to keep it cool, but there was still a HUGe heat problem.
I realized the projector was scorching hot. It's got a 575 watt hetal halide stage light causing there to be a world of burning and heat and stuff like that in that little black metal projector. it was way hotter in that black box than it had any right to ever be.
Flaw one is that it just has a single fan in the box. Flaw two is that the box had no airtake. Flaw three is that the fan barely spun. Added some oil to the fan, and masking taped a side up. Found a random fan from a refridgerator just lying around, so I traced a circle a little bigger than that (using a compass) on the masking, and broke out the jig-saw. Drilled some holes and bolted the fan down. The wiring inside the box is hard to get to, so I just put a 120v line on the fan and called it a night. Woulda been nice to do a decent job, but man, i was minutes away from completion.
I reassembled everything, duct taping the legos down to the side of the projector, placing the panel gingerly down on top. Taped the two stands the whole monstrosity sits on back together and realigned the cheeze-it airflow deviceto keep the LCD cool. Taped everything down into place. Attached the control circuitry for the LCD "safely enough" and started plugging things in (2 fans, 1 LCD and 1 projetor).
Its been running ever since.
Dad brought back the $200 heat scanner today. 102 degrees at the hottest, after over 12 hours of use. Most of the LCD's right around 95, which is perfectly fine for it.
The image is great. We'll start with the bad. Unfortunately, the LCD's a bit bigger than the projector, so I'm missing some of the screen. To worsen things, because i have to elevate the panel, i get even less of the screen visible. By moving and rescaling DScaler and PowerDVD, we can perfect our viewing area, so the image we want appears perfectly on the screen, but its not as sharp as it could be, since were not using all the pixesl.
The image is a bit over 800 x 600 pixels visible, which is still a whole, a certifiable shitload oh pixels. I would <b>definately</b>like more, but i can live. Besides, the s-video source thats got the PS2 plugged into it isnt even 800x600 in quality, its already stretching.
I might almost say the 350:1 contrast ratio of the VG150 makes it LESS suited to this job, as evident in gran turismo 3 in Smokey Mountains, where you have some uber high contrast scenes, jumping from brightly lite mountain side to darkened forest paths. If you've got a fairly constant light balance game or movie, you can tweak you gamma settings perfectly, to any game, but things that change frequently are harder to fine tune. You can software reduce contrast ratio, but its just not the same thing. I initially bought the high contrast ratio system thinking the highest contrast system i could find would be best suited to having a 17,000 lumen bulb shown through it, but it turns out that its actually possibly overkill.
But regardless of those things, i'm still in totally new world. This is unlike anything i've ever seen before.. I can have lights on, and the image is still clearly visible, its so bright. Not a dream of a concern about brightness. You can get some really amazing colors making up some pretty amazing scenes. Widescreen is the greatest creation ever.. My friends are playing Grand Theft Auto right now, and i cant seem to stop the drool that keeps rolling off my lips. This is the best $350 I've ever spent in my entire life, without any quesiton.
What i'd really like right now are three things. One, a photoshop style Curves for brightness, two, a way to have presets with it, and three, a way to run a resolution something like 824 by 755 using the pixels at the center of my screen.
gonna start playing with powerstrip now in hopes of added tweaking. if anyone knows any other tools, i'd be appreciated.
