So, I'm setting up a semi-dedicated HT room. It's also going to be used by my wife for acting rehearsal and singing practice, so I can't permanently block off windows, or go crazy with stuff.

I have a bit of a tight deadline for getting the setup, done, too - and I'd like to keep my options open for changing things in the future should it be necessary. And I'd like to minimize slicing the room up.

As luck would have it, I have a perfect equipment closet built in, to the left of where you'd sit watching a movie.

My idea is this: Build a riser in the back, and instead of table mounting the PJ in the middle, put it *IN* the riser, so you're basically sitting ON the projector rather than UNDER it.

This would be insane with an Ampro, but I have a Barco 808s which is fairly slim height wise. A 14" riser should give me clearance.

This is going to mean that the screen will be low to the floor - plus, the best seating will be higher. I (and, luckily, my wife) generally prefer a lower screen to a higher one, but sitting 14" up and having the bottom of the screen for 16:9 smack on the floor is a bit much. I think it would end up being about 7" up, but that's still a bit on the low side.

So, the obvious thing is to tilt the projector back and run the image toward the bottom of the phosphor rather than centered vertically.

This will make marginally more trapezoid (I can't tilt it THAT far) but would also move the active image area to the bottom half of the tubes. Normally, these PJs were meant to use the whole image area, so that *ought* to be OK as far as geometry setup and electronics load, but I might be wrong. Will that shift be a big problem for the PJ to handle? Naturally if I use it for a while it will lower the resale value since a standard mount won't work well anymore, but I'm not planning on getting rid of the Barco for a *long* time.

Interesting concept. As far as moving the active area to the bottom of the raster as radically as you said you can also tilt the screen down to alleviate electronic burdens.

You'll also have to engineer a way to get some air to the pj that isn't too loud. This time of year dumping the heat out into the room is a desired thing but winter won't last forever...although it certainly seems like it in the middle of January. :rolleyes: So a way to get rid of it later will have to be thought out while building the riser. Perhaps if your riser is up against the rear wall (and you own the home) you can vent it out through the wall...or even into the wall space would be OK.

If you double curtain rod the windows you can install blackout curtains behind the purdy ones and slide the BO's out when you need 'em and they'll be hidden the rest of the time. If all you can find are black on one side and white on the other. You could hang them with the black out and the white in if the other way messes with the nice ones.
Do you have pets? Hopefully you don't have one like I do....a Jack Russell with an attitude who THINKS he can whizz wherever he pleases. The lenses wouldn't take to kindly to a pet like him.

Just some thoughts off the top of my head. Good luck.

Greg

You'll be sacrificing focus and possibly convergence by not centering the raster. The edges of the image always have worse focus and astig than the center.

The funny thing is that as far as I can tell, focus and so forth is a moot point until I start running HD. I'm scraping every bit of quality I can (with my HTPC hardware) out of a 1271 resolving 1184x666, and there just isn't any more information I can wrench out of a standard DVD. I doubt that resolving power will be my biggest problem.

Some calculations with the barco suggest that I can get the center line of the image 36" above my seating baseline with a very small (~4 degrees) tilt up on the PJ. So I've got 15" floor to top of riser, and 51" floor to screen center.

I've seen a lot of guys where they have the screen centers WAY the hell up in the air - about 6 feet off the ground - and I can't even imagine watching a movie that way. Must be the same people who sit in the front row at the Evil Cinemas 666 in the strip mall. Generally I'd like center-sightline or a tiny bit above. I suspect this will be a bit below and I've just got to try it to see how it feels.