basspig
Veteran
I just returned from aligning a Mitsubishi projector for a well-off friend of mine. It's a higher-end model with a lot of lumens. He had it shown on a 110" DaLite screen and when I got there, the black was dark grey and my task was to see if it could be improved.
To make a long story short, I was more successful than I thought possible and achieved blacks that put some LCDs to shame, and achieved a decent range of shadow detail and a fairly bright overall image.
I bought my Blu-ray disc of various events I shot with the EX1 as a test disc, since I'm very familiar with the way that footage looks.
Well, I can tell you, EX1 footage on a 110" screen, viewed from 8' puts traditional cinema to shame! It was almost like looking at life with the nake eye. People were life-sized, cars, dogs, etc., and despite the huge screen, the footage was razor sharp. The colors were just as vivid as on my LCD TV at the studio. We had the room almost dark, but for some dim ambience lights behind the screen, splashing on the front wall. The images popped off the screen with amazing clarity I did not expect. It was better than Imax, in fact. It was clear, loaded with fine detail. No grain, no blurring of images, no out of focus sensation like I always get in the cinema with 35mm prints. This was so good that it caused me to re-think the idea of getting a projector. I saw a Barco projector 20 years ago that cost as much as a starter home and it wasn't this good, or even close.
The pleasant surprise was how the EX footage looked like real life, not a projected image, on this system. The HID light source is true daylight and the daylight scenes looked just right and nearly bright enough. Maybe with 30% more lumens, it could have been perfect, but the DLP technology is amazing!
On top of that, the projector only consumes 2.5 amps at 120VAC--less than a Plasma TV. Bulb life is estimated at 5,000 hours. Now this is worth considering.
If you've never seen EX1 footage on a huge screen, by all means find someone with a high end projection system that's 1080P and put that footage on BD-R and show it. It's so much clearer, cleaner and sharper than projected film there is no contest!
To make a long story short, I was more successful than I thought possible and achieved blacks that put some LCDs to shame, and achieved a decent range of shadow detail and a fairly bright overall image.
I bought my Blu-ray disc of various events I shot with the EX1 as a test disc, since I'm very familiar with the way that footage looks.
Well, I can tell you, EX1 footage on a 110" screen, viewed from 8' puts traditional cinema to shame! It was almost like looking at life with the nake eye. People were life-sized, cars, dogs, etc., and despite the huge screen, the footage was razor sharp. The colors were just as vivid as on my LCD TV at the studio. We had the room almost dark, but for some dim ambience lights behind the screen, splashing on the front wall. The images popped off the screen with amazing clarity I did not expect. It was better than Imax, in fact. It was clear, loaded with fine detail. No grain, no blurring of images, no out of focus sensation like I always get in the cinema with 35mm prints. This was so good that it caused me to re-think the idea of getting a projector. I saw a Barco projector 20 years ago that cost as much as a starter home and it wasn't this good, or even close.
The pleasant surprise was how the EX footage looked like real life, not a projected image, on this system. The HID light source is true daylight and the daylight scenes looked just right and nearly bright enough. Maybe with 30% more lumens, it could have been perfect, but the DLP technology is amazing!
On top of that, the projector only consumes 2.5 amps at 120VAC--less than a Plasma TV. Bulb life is estimated at 5,000 hours. Now this is worth considering.
If you've never seen EX1 footage on a huge screen, by all means find someone with a high end projection system that's 1080P and put that footage on BD-R and show it. It's so much clearer, cleaner and sharper than projected film there is no contest!
