Some weeks ago I decided that it was about time to replace our ye olde faithful Sony 28-inch television with some sort of widescreen model. There were some good deals about for LCD widescreen units and a double bonus of these sorts of displays is that they are generally equipped with PC VGA inputs, meaning that my lounge server 'Wench' might be a better bet to play stuff than the XBMC on the Xbox. LCD was also attractive because the units are, as you’d expect, much thinner than CRT displays and the extra space would be most welcome in the odd way we had our couch, tele, speakers and so on rigged up.
Then by some superb twist of fate, I was asked to put together a page on projectors by one of the mags I freelance for. That meant I had to swot up on them and pretty soon I started to become very interested in the technology. I hatched a plan to take a look at a bunch of them by doing a round up in a gadget mag so I took a couple of days off and had half a dozen projectors delivered to my house from the leading brands. At this stage I still wasn’t really sold on the idea of a move to a projector, apart from anything else I had absolutely no idea how I’d make it work in our lounge.
The projectors ended up blowing me away in terms of how easy to set up they were and how bright they were. Over a decade ago when I was tech in a TV studio, projectors back then were of the three CRT tube variety and to this day nothing has done my head in quite as much as aligning all three of the guns to get a proper picture on that unit and it was only good in virtual pitch black with a rated output of 200 ANSI lumens. Modern projectors are absolutely tiny, particularly DLP (more on this later), in comparison and they ranged in brightness from 1000 to 2000 lumens. Madness.
So while I was at work, bored stiff by some twat trying to sell me advertising on the phone, I began to doodle on a bit of paper – trying to work out how I could arrange my lounge to make this work. It only has one wall suitable for a screen but this is at the opposite end of the room from where the cable coax and all the power is. Where do you put a projector? Roof is best but this becomes a pro install job which will cost a fortune and needs all your wires somehow plumbed in. Small table in front of couch would work but that would be obtrusive, especially given the wires which would have to run underneath the couch. Yet some of the projectors, I noted, had a hell of a zoom range. What if I put it behind the couch? That would place it near to Wench, which I could sit sideways directly behind the couch (it's a full size tower PC) and nick the old Sony television stand and put the cable TV box and Xbox on top and all the broadband, wireless and router shit and the power board farm in there. It also meant moving a small freezer out of a corner and where the old hi-fi shit was.
After lots of tweaking, I ended up with something which was nigh on perfect. I've a small wooden table sat on top of a larger table behind the couch with the projector on top. It's not pretty and it needs to be replaced by some sort of dedicated stand but it’s high enough that i'’s throwing directly to the centre of the wall image negating the need for any keystone adjustment and yielding as sharp a picture in PC-mode as possible. Somewhere along the line I decided that if I was going to have a big ass projector, I may as well go whole hog with the home cinema set up and get me some 5.1 audio too – be rude not to really. Logitech have just brought out the
Logitech Z-5500 Digital which is brand-new version of the legendary Z-680 but even bigger. 505W RMS output. No really. So I, err, borrowed a set of these for a review as well.
The huge sub woofer bin, and it really is massive, sits beside the couch in the recess in front of the fireplace. The missus complained we were blocking the fireplace with this new lay-out but when she saw the whole set up in action, she quickly saw things my way. The receiver/cradle for the wireless mouse for Wench sits on the base bin and also gives good wireless reception. The keyboard lives on the small coffee table in the middle, nothing else fixed sits on that. Xbox is currently plugged into projector via s-video as after a length experiment with Xbox 720p HDTV outputs, I discovered that the PC output is simply superior. Xbox audio goes into Z-5500 via optical digital. Cable box goes into Wench line in and then out the sound card which is running in 6-speaker mode analogue direct out into the Z-5500. I'd do it via S/PDIF but for some reason AC3filter wont give me 5.1 S/PDIF passthrough out and I simply must watch the latest Lost HDTV rips in 5.1. This system works brilliantly now but it was arrived at after quite a bit of experimentation.
Now onto the projector. There are two types of projector technology, there's
DLP which is a proprietary technology from TI and quite the most lunatic tech you have ever heard of. In essence it's based on shining a lamp at a great big chip covered with microscopic mirrors that deflect a pixel-worth of light into or away from the lens. To get colour there’s a spinning wheel with filters after it. Traditionally DLP has been the most expensive technology and far superior to LCD which had terrible issues with contrast ratios, just like flat panel displays. However there’s a few major Japanese firms which have been working hard on LCD technology including Sony and Epson. The best projector out of the lot, I found, was the
Panasonic AE700EC. This is bigger than most of the others I looked at, because it's LCD, however it offers 1280 x 720 native widescreen and amazingly produces around 2000:1 contrast ratio and 1000 lumens. That’s amazing, to say nothing of the fact it’s got a proper RGB scart on the back (none of the others did), VGA port, S-video and composite jacks.
Without banging on about it too much, this projector is amazing and obliterated all the DLPs anywhere near it in money with only one costing three grand producing a better image. The lens can be zoomed, focused and adjusted in all directions to throw the image exactly where you want. Most projectors have an economy mode which is about 10-20% less bright but gives you another thousand hours of lamp life or so and, in the AE700's case, fan noise drops to inaudible. I found it still plenty bright apart from in broad daylight outside. Also, I originally planned to pop a projector screen on the wall and in fact used one for testing. However, despite the fact the wall is painted an off-white colour, the image off the plain wall is excellent so I did away with it and there’s no unsightly screen at all. It also means I can run it as large as I like and watching movies at night… well… it's just plain amazing. I can't ever imaging looking at a pokey little TV again.
From the comfort of my couch, I can zap between video sources and kick up Wench and sit there with the wireless keyboard and play media, kick off some new HDTV episode downloads and generally, well, it's absolutely amazing. Particularly coupled with the Z-5500 speakers. We're genuinely talking about a cinematic experience here, I don’t think I’ve ever undertaken a project where the results were of such high reward compared to the time and money invested – even if I had to buy the stuff new. In fact, retail of the projector and the Z-5500 speakers is around about £1600. That compares incredibly well versus a large expensive television and the traditional surround amplifier approach.
But not only have I managed to reclaim my lounge into an absolutely gob-smacking home cinema environment, it's much more practical too with the dining table near the windows, finally cleared the junk that used to live there we can now entertain and then treat guests to a free ticket to the movies. The obvious other angle here is games on the projector. This is indeed pretty amazing but I’m torn between being able to see pixels on an Xbox game but very large on the wall or playing on a PC with a 1600x1200 display and really the PC wins out.
However when Half-Life 2 comes out, I’m giving serious thought to moving Boris, my gaming desktop, into the lounge and giving that the whole projector and surround sound experience. It's got to be done.
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