recommend a retail projector

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#6
Stay away from Ally! It's overpriced, and it's parameters are falsified. Brightness is nowhere near the advertised value, fan noise is unacceptable, focus is poor (either sharp center, or corners, never both), there is a funny brightness falloff, corners are dim. And there is no chance that a 150W lamp overpowered to 250W will survive so many thousands hours, operating this projector may in fact be quite costly, and risky too (hazard of fire and personal injury).

Beware of LL statements, why do you think they still "don't have" a simple light meter, and are still "unable" to verify basic parameters, after years of being involved in DIY business? And they encourage people to tinker inside this projector, imagine this overpowered lamp exploding into your face...:hot:

Regards
 
#9
pepe303 said:
Stay away from Ally! It's overpriced, and it's parameters are falsified. Brightness is nowhere near the advertised value, fan noise is unacceptable, focus is poor (either sharp center, or corners, never both), there is a funny brightness falloff, corners are dim. And there is no chance that a 150W lamp overpowered to 250W will survive so many thousands hours, operating this projector may in fact be quite costly, and risky too (hazard of fire and personal injury).

Beware of LL statements, why do you think they still "don't have" a simple light meter, and are still "unable" to verify basic parameters, after years of being involved in DIY business? And they encourage people to tinker inside this projector, imagine this overpowered lamp exploding into your face...:hot:

Regards
Click to expand...


Sorry pepe,
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you there
The ally is actually quite a decent projector (although the ally is NOT the one LL are selling, they're selling a lower res PJ)!!

I've a sharp image across all of the screen (no blur at all, and I'm projecting at a 20 degree angle).
The brightness is very acceptable in a lit room, and there is very little vignetting. In fact, I can only notice a very small drop off in the very upper 2-3" right hand corner of a screen sized 100" diagonal.

With regards to cost,
mine cost $348, and shipping $100
total $448

Not bad 🙂

Also got a free bulb

The beauty of this PJ is that the res is 800x480, which suits 480p a dream if you hook it up to a scaler (XBMC in my case).

The only problem is indeed the fan noise, which is quite loud. I guess you could replace teh fans with very quite 80mm fans fairly cheaply though....
 
#10
This resolution 800x480 is a weird one. 800/480=1.66, while it should be either 16/9=1.77 or 4/3=1.33. Does it really handle a 480p input signal? Even if so, there is not much use of that for most of the world, as this is NTSC resolution, suitable mostly for US. For this price you can get a 800x600, REAL projector, built around present technology, bright, quiet and with more features. Why, tell me please why one would spend money on this outdated product of questionable quality? Because relatively cheap bulb will last "6000-8000 hrs"? Oh man, 150W bulb overpowered to 250W, no way it will last 6000 hours, and no way this projector has 1200lm output. So, this is obvious for everybody, that manufacturer (and reseller) lie about the light output, why would you believe them about lamp durability and other parameters? It may all be just made up as well.

A little digression, watch the "linguistic creativity", a factory manufactured projector is now a "premade projector". Not just retail or commercial or manufactured, or whatever (as they already blasted commercial units as "poor", "expensive", and so on), but "premade", like someone has "premade" it especially for you. Check Google for "premade projector", seems that LL is a very pioneer in this field 🙂

Regards
 
#11
pepe303 said:
This resolution 800x480 is a weird one. 800/480=1.66, while it should be either 16/9=1.77 or 4/3=1.33. Does it really handle a 480p input signal?
Click to expand...


Yep it handles 480p perfectly. I'm outputting 480p from my xbmc and the picture is razor sharp. Although, true 480p is 480x854, but in reality this makes little difference, as the loss of 54 pixels is not noticeable (the image is only stretched 6%!)

pepe303 [/i]Even if so said:
A little digression, watch the "linguistic creativity", a factory manufactured projector is now a "premade projector". Not just retail or commercial or manufactured, or whatever (as they already blasted commercial units as "poor", "expensive", and so on), but "premade", like someone has "premade" it especially for you. Check Google for "premade projector", seems that LL is a very pioneer in this field 🙂[/B]
Click to expand...

As I mentioned in my last post this PJ is not the LL pj (which is vga 480x600), and I'm not here to advertise nor condemn the sale of the LL pj.
I think the ptv01b offers a great solution for those that can't afford a svga unit and the expensive bulb costs of running it.

All the best
 
#12
Check this out

The above's a link to the number of 2.35 and 16:9 films that have been released.

It makes a 480x800 more appealing than a 480x600 pj 🙂
With regard to dvd movie watching on a PJ, the only difference you're going to see in picture resolution is if you buy a PJ that's outputting xvga or higher...
 
#14
Sorry, but you didn't get it. Screen resolution of 480 horizontal lines is specific to american TV standard NTSC. In Europe we use mostly PAL, which is 576 horizontal lines. Sure you can downscale PAL to 480 lines, as this projector does, and other US-specific video equipment, low-res plasma TV's, low-res home projectors, those things are intended to use with NTSC standard, although in addition such equipment also supports PAL, if you don't mind loosing significant part of information (20% of input signal lines, either simply cropped out, or rescaled down to fit into 480 lines of display device, at the cost of sharpness and image details).

Anyway, I agree it's much wiser to buy even such a low-end projector, than build one yourself, it's cheaper and results are better. But now I see in LL they "downscaled" even further, now they offer a 640x480 one. This resolution does not correspond to any video standard, movies 16:9 will be rescaled to 640x360 pixels, what a pity. Perharps NTSC broadcasts will be fine. I think this "downscaled" model came from the problems from the previous one, where that "wide" 800x480 panel resulted in bad corner focus and uneven light distribution. So the manufacturer applied a dirty fix - put a 4:3 panel, which is almost a square. That's an "engineering" 🙂

Regards
 
#16
There are some very good CRT based projectors with HDTV capability available in your price range. Check epay.

I run a BarcoData 1001 in my basement home theater on a 6X8 front screen and it is very good. This projector used large format 9" liquid coupled CRTs and high quality lenses. I won't replace it uintil the DLV light valve machines that use 3 engines and fixed dichroic light filters get cheap enough to afford. The single DLV projectors with a rotating color wheel filter suck with annoying color separation in on-screen motion despite impressive available screen brightness from low power lamps.

I also have a problem with not being able to take seriously any plastic piece of 'equipment' that weighs only four pounds as a *real* theater projector. My Barco weighs maybe 70 times that. My old Eidophor EP-6 light valve color projector with xenon short arc lamp and containing nearly 200 vacuum tubes weighed about 2500 lbs. and required a forklift to setup at professional CCTV events.
 
#17
As I have mentioned in my Ally review; its price-performance ratio is perfect. There is no commercial projector in the market; that includes 800x480 native lcd panel, and offers $20-30 lamp cost (with minimum 6000 hours of lamp life).

If you're expecting super picture quality, then ALLY PTV-01B will not satisfy you. But keep in mind that it's ~$500 only projector, and for that price it will provide decent picture quality in a dark room (with a quality curtain).
 
#18
HouseMachine said:
As I have mentioned in my Ally review; its price-performance ratio is perfect. There is no commercial projector in the market; that includes 800x480 native lcd panel, and offers $20-30 lamp cost (with minimum 6000 hours of lamp life).

If you're expecting super picture quality, then ALLY PTV-01B will not satisfy you. But keep in mind that it's ~$500 only projector, and for that price it will provide decent picture quality in a dark room (with a quality curtain).
Click to expand...


Hello everyone,

I was originally going to look into creating a projector/theater setup at home, Primarily for gaming. Cost was my primary concern, so I was looking for a projector or DIY setup that would have a long bulb life and/or cheap replacement bulbs since this would be regularly used.

Judging from other people's experiences, A DIY setup will probably cost around $250-300 plus many hours of hard work and tweaking to get it to look pretty good.

If this ALLY PTV-01B can provide a decent picture for under $500, plus the bulb life is 6000-8000 hours and are only ~$30 to replace, then it seems exactly like the type of projector that I'm looking for. I already have an old 8ftx8ft Da-Lite screen and the appropriate space in my basement (dark with ajustable lighting).

The question is, where is the best/cheapest place to get it, plus where do you get the replacement bulbs? Do you have to register on the ALLY site before the prices show up?

Thanks.
 
#20
makey2 said:



Sorry pepe,
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you there
The ally is actually quite a decent projector (although the ally is NOT the one LL are selling, they're selling a lower res PJ)!!

I've a sharp image across all of the screen (no blur at all, and I'm projecting at a 20 degree angle).
The brightness is very acceptable in a lit room, and there is very little vignetting. In fact, I can only notice a very small drop off in the very upper 2-3" right hand corner of a screen sized 100" diagonal.

With regards to cost,
mine cost $348, and shipping $100
total $448

Not bad 🙂

Also got a free bulb

The beauty of this PJ is that the res is 800x480, which suits 480p a dream if you hook it up to a scaler (XBMC in my case).

The only problem is indeed the fan noise, which is quite loud. I guess you could replace teh fans with very quite 80mm fans fairly cheaply though....
Click to expand...


Hi, what's the breakdown of this price, is the VAT /&customs included? And did you order it directly from Ally?

Thanks
 
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