moderators, feel free to move to correct thread if needed...
well after a couple of weeks of snooping around and late nights on ebay, i got my setup parts and went to work.
i went ohp/panel route
my setup:
1. nview z350 (got from 97transport)
2. 3m 9550 ohp
3. tv-3000
4. plastex screen from lowe's
as you may have guessed, i had no idea they made the tv-4000 which prob would have been better for this panel being that the resolution is xga. BUT, at vga setting on panel, i have nice picture, no visible motion blur etc. the tampa game was my first real viewing on the screen. it was great. DVD's work great via s-video cable and the little diy cardboard mask trick on the screen for sharp edges on the 16*9 aspect.
The only prob i ran into was that the overhead was very diffuse when i turned it on. i thought this sucks! but i quick inspection when i thought i would have to upgrade to a MH retrofit and i discovered that during shipping the lens that is in front of the bulb was not snapped in place to direct the light to the mirror inside. Once i snapped the little metal clip foward and the bulb was firing through the first of the triplet lenses to the mirror and then on through the fresnel and on up, the image was great!
All that being said, the results were good enough to watch the the ohp on the bright setting and it convinced my wife that the project of turning the spare 10'*10' room into a theater was ok.
NOW I WILL SELL ALL OF THE STUFF and buy the SVGA projector i have had my eye on at compusa that has been on sale for a while. (1000 lumens, SVGA, epson) it looks nice and will be better for a nicer setup. but this virgin setup was cool to get my feet wet and convince the better half that a home theater would be cool. i will spend a little money converting the room first(new surround system(sony has a nice 450 watt setup for like 275.00) nice screen(da lite)and a covering of walls etc like those before me in the forum with cloth instead of paint and the little touches that make the room an escape. ill post pics as i progress.
thanks, ltr
well after a couple of weeks of snooping around and late nights on ebay, i got my setup parts and went to work.
i went ohp/panel route
my setup:
1. nview z350 (got from 97transport)
2. 3m 9550 ohp
3. tv-3000
4. plastex screen from lowe's
as you may have guessed, i had no idea they made the tv-4000 which prob would have been better for this panel being that the resolution is xga. BUT, at vga setting on panel, i have nice picture, no visible motion blur etc. the tampa game was my first real viewing on the screen. it was great. DVD's work great via s-video cable and the little diy cardboard mask trick on the screen for sharp edges on the 16*9 aspect.
The only prob i ran into was that the overhead was very diffuse when i turned it on. i thought this sucks! but i quick inspection when i thought i would have to upgrade to a MH retrofit and i discovered that during shipping the lens that is in front of the bulb was not snapped in place to direct the light to the mirror inside. Once i snapped the little metal clip foward and the bulb was firing through the first of the triplet lenses to the mirror and then on through the fresnel and on up, the image was great!
All that being said, the results were good enough to watch the the ohp on the bright setting and it convinced my wife that the project of turning the spare 10'*10' room into a theater was ok.
NOW I WILL SELL ALL OF THE STUFF and buy the SVGA projector i have had my eye on at compusa that has been on sale for a while. (1000 lumens, SVGA, epson) it looks nice and will be better for a nicer setup. but this virgin setup was cool to get my feet wet and convince the better half that a home theater would be cool. i will spend a little money converting the room first(new surround system(sony has a nice 450 watt setup for like 275.00) nice screen(da lite)and a covering of walls etc like those before me in the forum with cloth instead of paint and the little touches that make the room an escape. ill post pics as i progress.
thanks, ltr
have you really HEARD the system .... like it is supposed to be set up?
I bought a pioneer rx 590 for 50 dollars in a pawnshop , surround sound 5 speakers , 1 front one L, one R and 2 rear speakers . The 2 front speakers are 36 inches high and serve as 2 subwoofers!!!!! what a sound.
i went to video only, best buy and circuit city... ever time i ran out of the store, i heard a sony, panasonic, yamaha 5550 and some other cheap sets. not one could compete with the, I think, almost 8 year old pioneer system
my 2 cents....
Jean-Pierre
Yeah, I was looking at the toshiba projector too, but at the CompUSA by me the only show it on a tiny 2-3 foot screen about 6 feet away, I'd like to see it in a proper setup.
Also, 1000 Lumens doesn't seem like much, although I'm not sure of how much Lumens our LCD panels are eating up.
Also, 1000 Lumens doesn't seem like much, although I'm not sure of how much Lumens our LCD panels are eating up.
Why does 1000 ANSI lumens seem so dim to our EARS?
I might wonder a bit of topic with this "speach" of mine, but I feel that this is seems to be a good place for stuff on subject why does it seem so small to our EARS and some (possibly very close to the truth) guesses about how much lumens the panels actually eat:
Most LCD's that are used on "put a LCD on top of OHP" -setups eat easily up to 80-95% of lumens that the OHP is able to produce (as is quite easily seen on reports of DIY people on this site). This is probably the biggest reason for these MH-retrofits (replacing the usual 250-600w (10000-20000 lumens) halogen with 400w-600w (20000-40000 lumens) MH-lamps). With a 250w halogen a normal OHP produces output of about 2000 lumens. Throw in a LCD that is not even meant for projecting and you'll end up with about 100-200 lumens or even less as can be seen on many threads on this site as people complain about the about non-existend brightness on many projects.
This dramatic drain of lumens at the point of the LCD-panel is probably the biggest reason for the twisted impression that 1000 lumens output is dim or at least not enough. We've become used to numbers like even 40000 lumens that some MH bulbs throw out and so on when we browse trough internet and read trough these forums.
With those LCD's that are meant for projecting the results usually are better and when someone posts about their results then there is a thread that has tons of people wondering about "how the heck is that possible with 250w halogen?" Therefor I'd assume that these panels are a bit different compared to the panels of LCD-monitors and such, and able to project more light trough them to the screen, maybe with a 60-85% drain. There might be some films in front and behind the actual panels to help more light trough and such things. At least it seems to be so by reading some messages about people's results on this forum.
I might add one more thing to this subject about how much light does LCD panels pass trough them. My own old 500 lumen Sony projector is now retrofitted to take cheap halogens and I get a viewable image even with 150w halogen (I'd say maybe about 200-300 lumens, about half of the 500 lumens it gave with the 120W UHP lamp). The old 150w halogen gave out about 4000-5000 lumens (it was really old) and the optics take in my case at least 30-50% (reflector can't reflect everything and there is of course lots of light that goes absolutely somewhere else than it is supposed to go as you can see @http://robo.zapto.org/semidiy there is lots of areas around the lamp where there is nothing that guides/reflects light towards the direction where it should be going), so even a professional product with highly optimized optics and so on seems to be able to let only about 10% trough of the light that is provided after lightsource's optics!
1000 lumens output is very VERY good. It is well viewable in daylight without curtains in a normal living room (well, with that exception that if the sun shines directly in to the room then you will not be able to project very well, not with any kind of projector I'd say). Even 500 lumens output is really really ok, the brightness is ok even with curtains open on a somewhat cloudy day. These numbers are based on my own real experience with commercial LCD- and DLP-projectors that I have used at home and at presentations in my work.
So.... I think I've said quite a lot about this stuff (again)... I'll just repeat my main point again ....1000 lumens.... I'd say that it is pretty ok brightness!
Regards
HB
ds21 said:
I might wonder a bit of topic with this "speach" of mine, but I feel that this is seems to be a good place for stuff on subject why does it seem so small to our EARS and some (possibly very close to the truth) guesses about how much lumens the panels actually eat:
Most LCD's that are used on "put a LCD on top of OHP" -setups eat easily up to 80-95% of lumens that the OHP is able to produce (as is quite easily seen on reports of DIY people on this site). This is probably the biggest reason for these MH-retrofits (replacing the usual 250-600w (10000-20000 lumens) halogen with 400w-600w (20000-40000 lumens) MH-lamps). With a 250w halogen a normal OHP produces output of about 2000 lumens. Throw in a LCD that is not even meant for projecting and you'll end up with about 100-200 lumens or even less as can be seen on many threads on this site as people complain about the about non-existend brightness on many projects.
This dramatic drain of lumens at the point of the LCD-panel is probably the biggest reason for the twisted impression that 1000 lumens output is dim or at least not enough. We've become used to numbers like even 40000 lumens that some MH bulbs throw out and so on when we browse trough internet and read trough these forums.
With those LCD's that are meant for projecting the results usually are better and when someone posts about their results then there is a thread that has tons of people wondering about "how the heck is that possible with 250w halogen?" Therefor I'd assume that these panels are a bit different compared to the panels of LCD-monitors and such, and able to project more light trough them to the screen, maybe with a 60-85% drain. There might be some films in front and behind the actual panels to help more light trough and such things. At least it seems to be so by reading some messages about people's results on this forum.
I might add one more thing to this subject about how much light does LCD panels pass trough them. My own old 500 lumen Sony projector is now retrofitted to take cheap halogens and I get a viewable image even with 150w halogen (I'd say maybe about 200-300 lumens, about half of the 500 lumens it gave with the 120W UHP lamp). The old 150w halogen gave out about 4000-5000 lumens (it was really old) and the optics take in my case at least 30-50% (reflector can't reflect everything and there is of course lots of light that goes absolutely somewhere else than it is supposed to go as you can see @http://robo.zapto.org/semidiy there is lots of areas around the lamp where there is nothing that guides/reflects light towards the direction where it should be going), so even a professional product with highly optimized optics and so on seems to be able to let only about 10% trough of the light that is provided after lightsource's optics!
1000 lumens output is very VERY good. It is well viewable in daylight without curtains in a normal living room (well, with that exception that if the sun shines directly in to the room then you will not be able to project very well, not with any kind of projector I'd say). Even 500 lumens output is really really ok, the brightness is ok even with curtains open on a somewhat cloudy day. These numbers are based on my own real experience with commercial LCD- and DLP-projectors that I have used at home and at presentations in my work.
So.... I think I've said quite a lot about this stuff (again)... I'll just repeat my main point again ....1000 lumens.... I'd say that it is pretty ok brightness!
Regards
HB
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