|
|
|
Pentium
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: Yesterday @ 23:52:48
Posts: 2,989,
Visits: 8,929
|
|
Ok, after following a link Slippy posted, I've found what looks like a decent choice of projectors, but I'm not sure which one to go for* The resolutions range from 800 x 600 to 1280 x 1024 but I don't know whether the difference in the ANSI figures or contrast ratios is going to make a real world difference to me. The room it will be in will either be an attic or basement conversion, so background light shouldn't be too much of a problem, but at the same time I don't want to be restricted as to where I can use it (within reason  ). The four I've found are: BenQ MP511+
Acer XD1150
Acer XD1250
Infocus Work Big IN24+
Any suggestions on which one would be better? The £300 to £350 price range would be my absolute maximum if anyone knows of any better projectors. Does anyone know what the lamp life / price is like? I don't want to get caught out like that further down the line 
Thanks for looking *read: beg the other half to let me have so she can get some peace and quiet
|
|
|
|
|
186
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 26/04/2008 00:51:54
Posts: 86,
Visits: 216
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pentium
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: Today @ 01:04:17
Posts: 8,025,
Visits: 14,935
|
|
Lamp life is typically 3000 hours on the economy setting and lamps usually cost between £100 and £200. It's still incredibly cheap when compared to the cost of, say, a 72" Plasma TV. Much cheaper to run too. The economy setting drops the Lumens output on mine from 2000 to 1300-ish. That's still plenty bright enough unless you have daylight shining directly onto the screen. Even 1300 can be a little over the top for night viewing when Rambo whips out the flash-bangs.
My InFocus X2 is possibly one of the worst pieces of design work I've ever come across in the mechanics department, so I'd suggest giving the InFocus a miss personally. The colour wheel fell to bits last weekend after roughly 10,000 hours of usage and I was luckily able to stick it back together. The mirror columnator fell to bits just outside the guarantee period and required me to completely dismantle the light-engine to repair that. In short, unless you find several outstanding reviews on the InFocus, avoid it as though your life depended on it. The Benq looks pretty good and will be my next purchase when my current projector finally totally disintegrates.
Regarding resolution, it's not as much of an issue as you might think it should be. Unlike TFT or Plasma displays, DLP doesn't have gaping great black chasms between the pixels. The boundaries between pixels are very small indeed and only become noticeable when displaying plain bright white images. A mildly textured screen will mask this very effectively anyway. It's also worth bearing in mind that every DLP pixel can be red, green and blue whereas a TFT or Plasma display has pixels of either red, green or blue. This gives DLP a third of the apparent colour pixellation for the resolution in terms of DPI before you even take the narrower pixel boundaries into the equation.
Using a modern video card feeding a VGA signal direct to the projector produces absolutely stunning images the likes of which I've not seen on any other kind of display device. If your graphics card supports sub-pixel processing along the lines of supersampling then the image you see will appear to be closer to a virtual 1600x1200 most of the time anyway. Games and ffdshow-enhanced movie playback are where you'll notice the most effectiveness from a properly set up PC driving your projector.
Cheers, Slipstreem. 
System specs: "Phoenix" - Intel C2D E4500 overclocked to 3GHz with ACF7Pro HSF on Volt-modded ASRock 775Dual-VSTA mobo (modded BIOS rev 3.10A and VNB=1.65, Vagp=1.8), 2x1GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800 RAM (3.0,3,3,8,1T @546MHz), Sapphire ATI HD3870 512MB GDDR4 PCIe graphics card overclocked to 850MHz GPU & 2.4GHz RAM. Powered by Hiper Type-M 580W PSU. Guess who likes overclocking on a budget. 
MP3 Encoding for Audiophiles
Fun MPEG-4 Encoding Race
MPEG-4 Playback Enhancement Using FFDShow
How good is the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro HSF really?
Boosting ATI Framerates with CCC (X700 on)
Optimise ATI Image Quality And Framerates With ATT (X1XXX Series under WinXP)
   
|
|
|
|
|
186
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 26/04/2008 00:51:54
Posts: 86,
Visits: 216
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pentium
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: Today @ 01:04:17
Posts: 8,025,
Visits: 14,935
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pentium
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 19/11/2008 17:37:49
Posts: 2,798,
Visits: 3,979
|
|
I've got a BenQ MP610, does around 3,000 hours per lamp. Replacement lamp is about £70. But, i consider this to be fairly cheap (2.3p/hour) and is certainly still much cheaper than getting an LCD tv etc of equivilant size.
I'd go for the BenQ personally
=-=-=-=
Core 2 Duo E4400, Gigabyte GA 965P-S3, 580W Hiper TypeR,
4GB Patriot PC6400, 512MB Sapphire X1950Pro, Linux Mint 5 x64
|
|
|
|
|
186
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 26/04/2008 00:51:54
Posts: 86,
Visits: 216
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pentium
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: Today @ 01:04:17
Posts: 8,025,
Visits: 14,935
|
|
|
| |