Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Projector vs Plazma TV

Thats what the boss said to me about 1.5 year ago. No way are you doing that. Now she gets to watch Debbie Travis in a 90 inch screen. I dare not change the channel or say the bulb will burn out in due time. I value the new LCD remote...those things are not as durable as a cheap All-in-one $30 remote control which used to fly towards me when she has "inadvertantly" lost control over it due to my err.

Its a little washed out becuase of the way I am taking the pictures. There is ambient light behind, left and right of me. No ambient light in front.
Check out my gallery from pictures 1100+. Click on thumbnails. What do you expect cable TV with is 280-320 lines. The TV tuner does scale it up a little bit but there is still too much crap in cable TV signal. This is not going through the scaler of the PJ...I will try that one day.

Its good enough for cable. HD does look awesome on the X1... maybe one day I'll order the service.
http://www.spacelofts.com/x1/index.htm


The easy way:
This is what I use to put cable TV on a projector. Output is VGA to PJ.
http://viewsonic.com/products/video_box_nextvisionn5.htm

The harder way:
Cable TV looks better if using a TV tuner on a HTPC. The PC can rescale the image a lot better. Thats a little harder to setup. Setting up the remote to accept PC commands. Not as WAF friendly unless configured properly.

Thanks for the reply, thats a great system you have.

Actually the pictures look a lot better than I thought they would. Considering the layout of my future viewing room FP is a consideration that I am now beginning to look at.

Nice use for the hockey pucks .

Its cheaper than Isolation platforms. Its temporary anyways till the loft is done in March-April. The other FPs to consider (if you havent already) is the Sanyo Z2 and Panasonic AE300. The X1 is the cheapest with excellent PQ to rival projectors $1500-$5000

How does the X1 picture quality compare to some of the higher models? Or is the main difference more that the expensive ones have more lumens so light control becomes less of an issue?

That depends. Your are correct in your point though. I am no expert (ask Sushi may be in order again) but based on my research well..the higher the price will buy you more resolution...sometimes the resolution is 4:3 sometimes its 16:9. 16:9 projectors tends be more more expensive but all 4:3(current ones at least) can do 16:9. Having a 16:9 projector could be better only because the 4:3 doesnt have to be rescaled to 16:9.
Having more lumens yes does cost more money but doesnt equate to better quality. It does equate to better pictures in ambient lighting. But movies are best in the dark so lumen output is not a critical factor. Actually high lumen output over saturates whites level and black levels are not black. For example PQ(picture quality)improves on the Panny model above when set to cinema mode...turns down lumen output.
Another thing to note...there is LCD and DLP projectors. I personally can't stand "chicken wire" or "grids" which can be prevalent in lower end LCD projectors. The Panasonic LCD PJ does a great job and apply certain filters/technology to get rid of those "chicken wire". While DLP even in the lower end has very very tiny "chicken wire".
DLP projectors use a spinning color wheel. Lower end PJ have 2 time color wheels. The higher model have 5 time color wheel. The faster the color wheel the less likely to see so called "rainbows" which does affect a small part of the population. So again someone may opt for a LCD projector because they are sensitive to the "rainbowing" on DLP projectors. But that disappears in time as your eyes gets used to it... as one gets use to the ummm met%$#%c or brig#* sound of Axioms.
Well for $900 USD you can get a X1 and project a 80-110 picture or a 32 inch Sony Wega CRT. Thats how I equated it at the time.
The X1 picture is as good or better than projector under $5000 from the last 5 years. The Sanyo Z2 at 1.5 times the cost is close in quality to the X1. The Panny a little better than the both but is 2.5 times the X1 and give a nicer cleaner 16:9 picture even in sitting position less than 10 feet. I would put any of these 3 budget PJ to quality up to about $5000.

My wife watches a lot of HGTV on our projector. She absolutely loves it. Analog cable looks OK, but you won't mistake it for hi-def.