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Spanky Ham
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 5643
Location: Comedy Central
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 Link Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 4:14 am Post subject: |
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| WTS wrote: | | Oh I didn't know Dave went to the other side. So what digital did you go with Dave, hope you got a good price for your Cine8. |
He was wanting to do the CIH, because he said 16x9 was a big TV.  I was trying to talk him into a blend, but a good affordable blending solution wasn't available. We were hoping to get beun to come up with something, but to no avail. Plus, he was complaining about which pj to use for the blend. In the end, I think he went with DLP. I would be curious which one he went with. He did mention that he would consider 720p and better performance than the cheapest 1080p. It is kind of funny considering Dave was one of the most pro-CRT guys out there.
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garyfritz
Joined: 08 Apr 2006
Posts: 12026
Location: Fort Collins, CO
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| Link Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 1:57 pm Post subject: |
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Dave showed me the DLP he switched to, shortly before the Barco came down. I have to admit I liked it. The DLP had a lot more "pop" than even the mighty Onyx could manage. Of course, that was with a new bulb. I don't think we did any hardcore fade-to-black comparisons, but it did throw a damn nice picture.
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Ridebreck
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 943
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
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| Link Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 2:40 pm Post subject: |
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| Spanky Ham wrote: | | WTS wrote: | | Oh I didn't know Dave went to the other side. So what digital did you go with Dave, hope you got a good price for your Cine8. |
He was wanting to do the CIH, because he said 16x9 was a big TV. I was trying to talk him into a blend, but a good affordable blending solution wasn't available. We were hoping to get beun to come up with something, but to no avail. Plus, he was complaining about which pj to use for the blend. In the end, I think he went with DLP. I would be curious which one he went with. He did mention that he would consider 720p and better performance than the cheapest 1080p. It is kind of funny considering Dave was one of the most pro-CRT guys out there. |
I'm pretty sure that his model is a 720p. I'll shoot him an email and ask him to post and let us know what he ended up with.
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Person99
Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 4901
Location: Flower Mound, TX
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| Link Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 8:54 pm Post subject: |
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| WTS wrote: | | Oh I didn't know Dave went to the other side. So what digital did you go with Dave, hope you got a good price for your Cine8. |
We are going to sell our house and I don't know if I will have a dedicated theater in the next house. Chances are very good that if I have a projector it will have to be in a combo room. So, I had four objectives of late:
1) Find a good home for the Onyx.
2) Get a digital to hang in the theater room that would be bright enough for some ambient light so that at house showings the theater really got people excited.
3) Get a digital that was cheap enough that I would not mind "throwing it in with the house".
4) Use this as an opportunity to really find out what digital I'd be willing to live with.
Additionally, I set a challenge for myself to see if I could actually put together a decent CIH set up for about $2000.
This began about 4 months ago. Here is what I decided on pretty quickly:
1) The good 1080p digis such as the RS2 or the better DLPs are VERY nice and if you are willing to spend the $$$ they are quite acceptable.
2) The LCDs have come a long way but they are still not engaging and have too many issues (chief of which seemed to be panel alignment issues). I calibrated a Panny 2000 with very very minor panel alignment issues that looked pretty good but not good enough that I would pop about $3000.
3) If you can live with the shortcomings, a 720p DLP had pretty good bang for the buck (and depending on viewing habits can outperform most 1080p LCDs for half the price).
Projectors as good or better than the $6000-$12000 720p DLPs from a couple years ago (H79, 12K MkII, etc) can be had for about $1000 now. These are the projectors that compared favorably with PJs such as the G70 (in one shoot out from a couple of years ago almost everyone preferred an H79 over a G70).
Given my "CIH for about $2000" goal, I could only spend about $1000 on the PJ. I wanted a PJ that:
1) Had a 5x color wheel (I can see rainbows).
2) Would sync to and properly display 48 and 72 Hz (and hopefully do the color wheel at 6x instead of 5x at 48 Hz).
3) Was bright enough to do a punchy picture on a 9.5' wide CIH screen.
4) Would do 1:1 pixel mapping.
5) Had "class leading" black levels
6) Had a long throw to minimize pincushion with the anamorphic lens
Well, I could find no PJ that could do all of those. I found that PJs rated at about 3000:1 on/off CR really got closer to 2000:1 when calibrated. This was fine for TV watching, but the black levels where way too grey for movie watching when a dark scene came on.
So, I ended up giving on the long throw and got a new Optoma HD7100 for $999 delivered with a 3 year warranty. These PJs are brighter and have a sharper picture than the H79. Also, they are not made by Optoma, they are made by a third party and sold under two different names in europe (for about $6000 US) and also sold in a different case by Planar as an $8000 high end 720p DLP as recently as last year.
I've calibrated it to an on/off of about 3800:1 and honestly, that is way more tolerable than it sounds. It is actually better than you ever get in a film or digital movie theater.
To complete the $2000 set up, I:
1) Build a Deigner White curved 9.5' wide 2.37:1 screen.
2) Bought a used Lumagen DVI for just over $300 delivered.
3) Got a new Home Theater Brothers Anamorphic lens and sled for just over $700.
Blu-ray and HD DVD are fed to the Lumagen at 1080p/24 and scaled/frame rate converted to 720p/48 and sent to the pixel mapped PJ.
The main shortcoming of the set up is 1080i/60 content. The Lumagen DVI does the 1080p/24->720p/48 as well as an HDP. It does 480i->720p/48 almost as well. Where it falls down is 1080i/60 movie content. Lacking a true 1080i film mode (which the HDP has), there is sometimes some poor deinterlacing performance.
The HD7100 has a tendency to crush blacks, but with the Lumagen's 11 point gamma, that can be almost completely remedied.
In the end, it is actually a pretty enjoyable set up for about $2000. Very fun to watch. And yes, once you go CIH, you'll never go back! If when we move I have to do a combo room with a drop screen I still don't know how I'll do CIH because you really need a curved screen to do it effectively.
In the end, I'd have to sum it up to say that the bright punchy sharp picture of the digital coupled with a real wide screen experience of a CIH set up makes for a very reasonably priced enjoyable set up, one that many would be happy with. In other words, the positives that the digi have make a compelling argument.
If however, you measure the set ups on negatives, the Onyx wins hands down as it simply has far fewer negatives than this set up. The current set up has occasional rainbows (although it is odd as the more I watch it, the less I see them), temporal and spatial dithering artifacts, very occassional minor banding, and tolerable but not engrossing black levels. After living with this for awhile, the only artifact that really annoys me is the dithering. But, for less critical viewers (such as my wife), these negatives are almost a non-issue.
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Dave
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my desk, I have a work station....
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drice1234
Joined: 07 Oct 2006
Posts: 1309
Location: Allen, Texas
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| Link Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 9:45 pm Post subject: |
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Dave,
Glad to see your back. Do you have any recommended links that explain CIH in basic terms? I have noticed almost every movie I watch now is not in the 16x9 format. The HT experience does not feel the same with only a portion of the screen being utilized. I had picked up a Mitsubishi HC3000 awhile back to play around with and to have a portable projector available. If and when my CRT dies I want to look into a setup that will give me back a larger screen viewing area.
Thanks
Dan
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Person99
Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 4901
Location: Flower Mound, TX
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| Link Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 10:12 pm Post subject: |
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| drice1234 wrote: | Dave,
Glad to see your back. Do you have any recommended links that explain CIH in basic terms? |
There are two ways to do CIH:
1) Anamorphic lens
2) Zoom.
With an anamorphic lens (the way it is done in theaters with film projectors), you stretch the image 33% vertically (making everyone tall and skinny thereby "pushing" the black bars off the screen). You then place a lens in front of the projector that expands the image horizontally by 33% (there are vertical compression (VC) lenses also, but I'll save discussion of these since HE (horizontal expansion) is more common).
Some links that explain this:
http://www.hometheaterbrothers.com/773.html
http://cavx.blogspot.com/2006/11/marks-home-theatre-projects-cih.html
The other option--zooming is not an option with a 720p PJ due to resolution. However, with a 1080p PJ, you can opt to zoom if your PJ has the correct zooming range. With this solution, when you show scope movies, you simply zoom the PJ image so the picture gets larger and the black bars are projected off the screen.
The lens approach gets you more light output on scope movies but introduces some artifacts. However, it remains the most popular approach.
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Dave
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my desk, I have a work station....
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WTS
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 1276
Location: Calgary
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| Link Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 11:31 pm Post subject: |
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Hi Dave,
Well it sounds like you're happy with the new setup for now. Hope you got a good price for the onyx.
I've got my onyx basically modded to the hilt now and with Moome's latest HDMI HD Full board(modded of course) mounted on the switcher board inside the pj it looks just fricking great. I haven't seen too many digitals lately but I think they would have a hard time pleasing me like this unit does now.
So I guess you've become our ex crt guy with the eye for digitals just in case someone wants to jump ship into the digital world. I will one day but hopefully by then they have all the short comings worked out and no more replacing bulbs either.
Walter
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Thanks
Walter
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garyfritz
Joined: 08 Apr 2006
Posts: 12026
Location: Fort Collins, CO
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| Link Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 12:19 am Post subject: |
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| Person99 wrote: | | The current set up has occasional rainbows (although it is odd as the more I watch it, the less I see them), |
Now that's an interesting observation. I'm VERY sensitive to rainbows. I always figured that was a constant. But apparently you can "get used to" them so you don't notice them as much?
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Person99
Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 4901
Location: Flower Mound, TX
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| Link Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 2:06 pm Post subject: |
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| WTS wrote: | Hi Dave,
Well it sounds like you're happy with the new setup for now. |
It is fun to watch and it was cheap enough that I can throw it in with the house if it helps sell the house.
| WTS wrote: | | I've got my onyx basically modded to the hilt now and with Moome's latest HDMI HD Full board(modded of course) mounted on the switcher board inside the pj it looks just fricking great. I haven't seen too many digitals lately but I think they would have a hard time pleasing me like this unit does now. |
I'd say that is very likely. As I said, the digital has its nice points but overall, the CRT produces a much more artifact free natural picture.
| WTS wrote: | | I will one day but hopefully by then they have all the short comings worked out and no more replacing bulbs either. |
LEDs will solve the bulb problem, they just have to get it right. Also, the bulb issue is not really that big for me. We only watch the projector 500-600 hours per year, so bulbs will last 2-3 years easy. Further, many PJs you can just buy the bare bulb for <$250, so not that costly at all.
We shall see what the future brings. If I do happen to get a dedicated room again, a CRT blend may be in my future, but I think it is more likely that I will not have a dedicated room and I will have to stick with the small user friendly form factor of the digi.
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Dave
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my desk, I have a work station....
Last edited by Person99 on Tue Sep 30, 2008 2:12 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Person99
Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 4901
Location: Flower Mound, TX
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| Link Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 2:11 pm Post subject: |
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| garyfritz wrote: | | Person99 wrote: | | The current set up has occasional rainbows (although it is odd as the more I watch it, the less I see them), |
Now that's an interesting observation. I'm VERY sensitive to rainbows. I always figured that was a constant. But apparently you can "get used to" them so you don't notice them as much? |
I used to see them quite often. On any color wheel slower than 5x it was intolerable. It may be that the brain "gets used" to putting the colors together so stops processing the individual colors. Not sure why, but now I only see them on serious torture scenes or white on black when I move my eyes around just right. If I had to put a rough number to it, I'd say that I see them about 60-70% less often then when I first started watching it.
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Dave
A train station is where the train stops. A bus station is where the bus stops. On my desk, I have a work station....
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator
Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah
TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010
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| Link Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 2:31 pm Post subject: |
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Dave,
Maybe you could snap a few photos and put together a simple post with some links to the lens, sled, etc. I can see the occasional CRT user in your shoes - moving to a smaller place, losing a dedicated room, etc. I could even see somebody who has a CRT die not being interested in resurrecting it possibly considering a move to digital, too. Might be nice to have a new thread with yours as the first post, detailing what you just in the last few posts. It could be the "CRT to digital switchers'" thread.
I know if my G70 died, I would prefer to replace it with a CRT... But, I would absolutely consider a CIH setup if I could do it cheaply enough... which is exactly what you did.
SC
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