Giganticus
Posted by marshall Tue, 24 Jan 2006 05:03:00 GMT
So the projector was ceiling mounted, fulfilling a dream of many years. Yet all was not rosy in the land of Home Theater. I was a bit nervous about the stability of the hushbox. I was very nervous about something bumping the projector and having to adjust the aim again. I had big black wires running across the ceiling to a power strip barely balanced on top of the vertical blinds. All in all, it was ugly and precarious. Not quite the beautiful system I had envisioned.
There were further problems. I soon came to the disheartening realization that my retro-reflective high-power screen is designed to reflect light back in the same direction as the source. This is great when the projector is right next to your head (deafening you with fan noise just before your skin melts from the heat from the bulb), but not so great when the projector is suspended high overhead: the picture is rather dim when one sits on the floor or even the couch.
To top it off, one of the fans in the hushbox wasn't working. This caused the projector to overheat and shut itself off on New Year's Eve (thankfully after the main event). Now, this is probably some minor electrical thing that a do-it-yourself type could easily fix. I am not such a type. Well, perhaps I am with software, but electrical hardware remains a mystery to me. So this minor electrical straw basically killed my home theater camel. After all, who wants to watch a movie with the constant fear of the projector overheating and burning up right before it falls on your head?
Slowly, painfully, the understanding came that I had just poured a lot of time and money into a dream that would remain elusive. I would need to fix the fan. I would need a new screen that would reflect differently. I would need longer cables. I would need to re-mount everything when we moved to Idaho. I would need to replace the bulb in another 1,000 hours. All for a projector that wasn't even capable of fully displaying HD video.
The costs of front projection were starting to outweigh the benefits. I began to consider an option I had hoped I wouldn't be considering for a long time: replacing the projector. (Cue dramatic music.)
The advance of home theater
When I bought the projector in 2001, it was the best home theater option I could find in our price range. Rear-projection televisions (RPTVs) at the time were mostly bulky, heavy, CRT-based monstrosities, difficult to move from place to place and requiring regular tune-ups to keep the picture looking decent. DLP front projectors, on the other hand, provided a film-like image, required very little space, and had a most wonderful solution to the "I need a bigger screen" problem: to go from a 30" picture to 100" picture, simply move the projector back a bit.
The passing years have changed the home theater landscape somewhat. First, affordable DLP-based RPTVs have become commonplace, fitting a DLP projector and a screen into a single, relatively thin unit. Second, high-definition content has become much more prevalent, and this year will introduce even more. When I bought my projector, the main focus was DVDs and the GameCube, both of which output a standard TV resolution of around 720x480 pixels. An XGA projector like my LT150 has a resolution of 1024x768, which is more than capable of displaying this. But modern high-definition TV and game consoles display at up to 1920x1080, over two and a half times the LT150's resolution; a lot of detail must be dropped in order to display it. To think of it in terms of LCD computer monitors, it would be like going from the detail of a 23" down to a 14".
I think I realized that rear-projection TVs had come into their own when my parents bought their Samsung RPTV last year. I discovered that the picture looked better than my projector, it could be watched during the day without putting thick black curtains over the windows, and it didn't require the whole hushbox and ceiling mount business. I was horrified. These were, after all, my parents. How did they, the amateurs, end up with a better video system than the professing home theater nut? Now, theirs was a 1280x720 television, whereas I would want something that displayed a full 1920x1080 resolution before I would consider replacing my system. But it was then that the idea entered my shocked mind that when RPTVs came out with 1080 lines of resolution, I might actually be interested in them.
Return now to the first days of 2006. The ordeal of ceiling mounting the projector had taken a big chunk out of my enthusiasm for my projector. The fan problems, the wiring, the instability, the dimness, the resolution...it was becoming more troublesome and expensive than it was worth. So, for kicks, I started looking up RPTVs.
This is a very dangerous thing to do for kicks.
The 1080p advantage
I found that in the past year, the major manufacturers have come out with DLP-based RPTVs capable of displaying a full 1920x1080 picture. As I looked up information on TVs from Samsung and Toshiba -- two respected brands in this field -- I kept coming across references to a set by HP. At first I dismissed it; I'd choose other printers over HP's, I don't like their computers, and their scanner drivers cause me to twitch uncontrollably...but the reviews of the HP DLP televisions were surprisingly positive.
People were saying that the picture was the second-best they'd seen; the first being a Sony LCOS-based television that cost around $13,000 -- almost four times the price. They were saying how ingenious the HP's cable management system was. They were saying how the HP's firmware could be updated using a USB flash drive. And they were saying how it was the only DLP television that accepted a 1080p input. This final point was the fish hook that really caught my eye (ouch).
Currently there are two standards for high-definition broadcasting: 1080i and 720p. The number has to do with the picture resolution (1920x1080 vs. 1280x720). The "i" in 1080i stands for "interlaced": first the TV draws all of the even lines in the picture, then it draws all of the odd lines. Since only half the picture is being displayed at any given time, this causes a kind of flicker effect. Virtually all standard-definition TVs are interlaced, a vestige of long-solved problems with early televisions. The "p" in 720p stands for "progressive": all of the lines in the picture are drawn at once, so it appears solid and sharp. This is how computer monitors work. So the two standards are a kind of tradeoff: higher resolution with flickering (1920x1080 interlaced), or lower resolution without flickering (1280x720 progressive).
This year, new high-definition DVD players are coming out (Blu-Ray and HD-DVD). These new players, along with the upcoming Playstation 3 console, will output 1080p. That's the full 1920x1080 resolution of 1080i, but with the solid image of 720p. And the HP television is currently the only one that will accept a 1080p signal; other TVs will only accept 1080i. The HP, I concluded to my own astonishment, was the future-proof, full-resolution television I'd been waiting for.
The new set
And so I took the money that I had been planning on saving for a new Intel-based Mac and put it toward a new 58" HP television with matching stand instead. HP was offering free shipping and an 18 month interest-free loan, of which I took advantage. At first their credit department -- handled by HSBC -- didn't authorize enough for the TV, but I asked nicely for an increase, and they said OK. The (extraordinarily heavy) stand arrived via FedEx in a few days, and I wasted no time in getting it set up and moving the receiver and DVD player and Xbox to it. It took another week for the TV to arrive, but the delivery company called me to set up an appointment ahead of time, and they also called an hour before arriving at the apartment to ensure that I was there. Very good service. And free!
So now we have a full high-definition TV in our living room. We have the antenna hooked into it so that we can get all the major network stations over the air from LA, including 2 different PBS variants with constant full 1080i signals (one of which has a piano show that Lara's enjoying). We have the DVD player hooked into it with a progressive-scan stream. We have the Xbox hooked into it, also with a progressive-scan stream. We can watch it during the day. In fact, we have to leave some lights on in the evening or it's too bright.
I invited some friends over to play Halo 2 in widescreen. My friend Lee immediately christened the TV "Giganticus", saying something that big had to have its own name.
There are no looming boxes overhead, no unsightly cables stretched across the ceiling, no sudden loss of picture due to overheating. Sure, it's not quite the enormous picture that I had projected on the wall, but the brightness, resolution, and sheer convenience of it more than make up for the slight decrease in picture size.
I still think projectors are a wonderful option for people who want portability or a true theater experience; a TV feels like a TV even with a large screen. But for me, the HP is the home theater centerpiece I've been looking for all along...it just took me some time to realize it.
