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.)
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Posted in Pictures, Home Theater
Posted by marshall
Tue, 24 Jan 2006 02:25:00 GMT
Around the middle of this past December, our projector bulb hit 1,000 hours. Projectors (and, by association, rear-projection TVs) have a bulb in them that has a life expectancy of a certain number of hours; in the case of the LT150, the magic number is 1,000. At that point, the bulb needs to be replaced. Bulbs that are run past their life expectancy have a tendency to explode, which can cause serious injury and/or death to the projector.
As I began to read about replacing the bulb, I came across some forum posts by Serious Home Theater Buffs (TM) about modifications to the LT150 to improve the picture. One of the biggest ones was disassembling the projector and painting over the clear segment of the color wheel, which required a bit more comfort with the concept of ripping apart a finely-tuned electronic device than I could muster. There was another modification, though, that did not require such drastic measures: placing a Hoya FL-D color filter in front of the projector. I further learned that Whisperflow, a well-known hushbox maker, could build such a filter into a hushbox design. I decided that I would do a projector tune-up: new bulb, hushbox with color filter, and -- finally -- ceiling mount.
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Posted in Pictures, Home Theater
Posted by marshall
Tue, 17 Jan 2006 00:32:00 GMT
If you didn't just come across this blog during random wandering, you probably know that I have a certain fondness for home theater. This dates back to my early college days, when my roommate in the RIT dorms brought in his stereo with some impressive-looking (though not necessarily impressive-sounding) speakers, and I bought a massive 27" GE television from Sam's Club. It was, sadly enough, the largest and loudest video equipment on the floor, and soon we were hosting movie nights in our room. These events birthed the dream of one day getting a projector and having a real home "theater".
When I moved out of the dorms into an apartment, my new roommate had a Pro Logic surround sound system. In the spirit of kickin' it up a notch, I bought one of the early computer DVD drives and hooked it up to the TV and sound system, bringing us into the brave new world of digital video. (This was back when only the local specialty stores carried the few DVD movies in existence, and I was buying such award-winning classics as Tomorrow Never Dies just because they were on DVD.) The dream continued to come into focus: a ceiling-mounted projector, a progressive-scan DVD player, and a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound system.
It took several years for the dream to come true, but in September 2001, it did. Lara and I bought a Pioneer surround sound receiver, a set of speakers, and an NEC LT150 XGA DLP projector -- one of the best sets of acronyms found in a projector available at the time in our price range. We hooked a progressive-scan DVD player into it, and eventually ran a Nintendo GameCube into it as well. We got a lovely 84" high-power screen to display the projected image. It was good. Yes preciousss. Only one thing remained: mounting the projector on the ceiling.
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Posted in Home Theater
Posted by marshall
Sun, 08 Jan 2006 13:16:00 GMT
If I were the type to make New Year's Resolutions, I might make one to update this blog more frequently over the course of the next year. But despite my best attempts to revive this thing every now and then, it seems to languish for months at a time with no posts. Ah well. I recommend an RSS news reader (Firefox, Safari, SharpReader, NetNewsWire) if you'd like your computer to do the work of checking this blog for you.
Lara and I spent Thanksgiving in San Francisco with my brother Adam and his wife Britany. Good times. We ate at a restaurant on the pier called Butterfly, which served us a quite nice Thanksgiving dinner. The Sony Metreon was playing Chicken Little in Digital 3D, so we went to go see that. Nice, but not the completely stunning experience I was expecting given the technology. Adam & Britany headed out of the city before Lara and I did; we spent a couple more days walking around and seeing the sights. San Francisco's such a great city: the international flair, the bush man, the ability to get just about anywhere by walking, the ocean, the bay, the nearby forests and mountains...it's a neat place to be.
Adam and Britany got an iSight as an early Christmas present from other family members, so now 5 out of the 7 households in our combined family (Lara's parents/siblings and mine) can do video chats. Multi-way video chats in iChat are very cool:
Lara's mom and my sister Ingrid are the only hold-outs now...both under the heavy influence of friends/family who only know Windows and still cling to antiquated notions of the superiority of Windows over the horrible, unstable, limited old Mac OS. Understandable if one's never spent any significant time with OS X, but sad nonetheless. Ingrid just had to get her system reformatted because of some malware that couldn't be removed by Spybot or Ad-Aware or other scanners; I don't think she realizes that these problems are not universal to all computers.
It was a fairly quiet Christmas this year; we didn't do any traveling, so we were pretty much by ourselves. We opened presents in the morning, and spent a fairly lazy day at home before going over to my friend Jon's apartment to play Compatibility with him and his fiancée. Fun times.
For New Year's Eve we invited some friends over to play games, eat snacks, and watch the ball drop on the big screen. We don't have cable, so we were using the EyeTV with an antenna. Unfortunately, we're pretty far from the TV transmitters near L.A., so the picture was kind of going in and out. At least we saw the Big Moment clearly.
That's about it for the major events. 2006 should be an interesting year, what with MAF's move to Boise, Apple's move to Intel, and our move to a vegan lifestyle. Just kidding about that last one. With Carl's Jr. now serving hand-dipped chocolate malts, there's no escape for me now.
Posted in News, Pictures
Posted by marshall
Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:44:00 GMT
There are two key elements to a successful microwave dinner: quality and convenience. Quality is of course obvious: you want the food to taste good. I avoid Freezer Queen and Banquet dinners for this reason; I simply don't like the way they taste. But the convenience aspect seems to be sadly misunderstood by several of the microwave dinner manufacturers.
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Posted in Gallimaufry
Posted by marshall
Wed, 28 Sep 2005 19:29:00 GMT
I love TextMate. It is the software I spend the vast majority of my time in during the day, and I'm constantly discovering new worlds of functionality in it.
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Posted in Computing
Posted by marshall
Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:38:00 GMT
There's an interesting article on the New York Times site about digital projection and 3D. The thing that caught my eye about it was the screen refresh info. Apparently the 3D version of Chicken Little will be shown at "144 frames per second".
Now, I'm guessing they actually mean the projector will have a refresh rate of 144 Hz, and the movie itself will still have a standard 24 frames per second. But the point is that with digital projection, they can run the projector at a far higher refresh rate than film projectors have run, making it possible to alternate left and right images for 3D very quickly. With 144 Hz, each eye is essentially getting a 72 Hz refresh rate, which is what a lot of people run their CRT computer monitors at. That's pretty cool.
I wonder what the implications for this are for home theater. The article says they use a single projector. Hmmm...
Posted in Home Theater
Posted by marshall
Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:10:00 GMT
I came in to work this morning and there was an instant message up on my screen. It said it was from a user named rn55gjs2721950. I knew at once that it must be my long-lost friend Ronald Norman, who's currently 55, works in Australia for GJS Machinery, has a collection of 272 PEZ dispensers, and was born in 1950.
But alas, it was merely IM spam. Oh well. Guess I'll never hear from Ronald after all.
Posted in Gallimaufry
Posted by marshall
Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:55:00 GMT
Well, it's official. Palm's new Treo will run Windows Mobile. And they're partnering with Verizon to release it first. So the most promising smartphone manufacturer is now in bed with the most predatory monopoly-abusing software company, along with the wireless company with a history of crippling phones so it can charge customers for things that should be free. What happy news.
Posted in Smartphones
Posted by marshall
Wed, 21 Sep 2005 23:47:00 GMT
Ah, Redlands, where you can see what you breathe. The smog generated by thousands and thousands of square miles of running automobiles comes in and settles here, frequently hiding the nearby mountains in summertime. It does cause some quite lovely sunsets, though:
The sunsets in Idaho are supposed to be brilliant, too, despite the lack of smog. All the benefits with none of the drawbacks? Almost sounds too good to be true.
Posted in Pictures
