Anyone have experience with projector models for home theater? There is a big price difference between say a Dell and a Sharp.
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First: screen res, contrast ratio and lumens / brightness.
The sony has a higher res (1280×768:1024×768), better contrast (2,500:2,100), but is not as bright (1200:1500)
Then you have things like keystone functionality, build quality and cost of spare globes
i’d say to watch bulb cost, we have some philips ones at work and they average 4000 hours (they’re rated at 6000) and cost £300+
I don’t know if you’d have time for a do-it-yourself project, but this website looked interesting:
http://lumenlab.com/
Alex,
the goto URL for this is http://avsforum.com/
I built a 16footx9foor screen using the
dazian material which is pretty cheap.
the projector situation is pretty much down to a couple of things.
1. how much can you pay (as ever)
2. can you sound isolate the projector (brighter=louder)
then you need to find out if you can see DLP rainbows, if you can it makes some choices of projector less than optimal for you.
the setup i have cost (nowadays) around $700 buck for the SANYO Z1 projector and about $80 for the screen material. when picking the projector, if your space is dark, like a basement tends to be, then concentrate on CONTRAST as getting deeper blacks is really important.
in the sound arena look for a receiver that has auto balancing of the speakers. pioneer calls this MCACC. this will ensure the best surround experience from a non-professional setup.
the next gen of projectors coming out will have full HD 1920×1040 but will likely be $$$, the SANYO i have is ‘quarter HD’ in that is has half the rows horizontally and vertically, this means it does HD without any scaling artifacts.
bulb cost will be an issue, although my projector has dropped in cost from $2000 to $700 the bulb price has remained @ $300, i go through a bulb every 12 months or so.
hope this gets you started, i you want you talk more drop me a PM