LG PA70G $399 at Fry's

Have been watching Fry's for the last few weeks for the PA70G to drop again and today it happened, even less than before at $399. Was torn between going lower end and cheaper LED vs a 1080p lamp unit, the massive attraction of course being worry-free operation--turning it on for as long and as often as I want without having to yell at the kids about the LAMP, or them forgetting it on at night. If it turns out too disappointing it seems there's plenty of demand for it to sell it again at no loss and I will probably switch to a Viewsonic PRO8200.

Picked one up at the store in Duluth, GA, and OMG what a disorganized mess that store was. Took them over an hour to just find my reserved unit. I'm coming from an Optoma H31 that I had since 2005 and that I'm really only upgrading from right now because it got stolen during a recent break-in; yanked right off the ceiling mount without detaching it first, breaking the base of the housing and no doubt rendering it useless in the process (the tripod mount thread of the housing is still on the ceiling mount with parts of the aluminum base).

Anyway, so far so good. Brightness is about the same as the H31 in a dark room, which only had about 1400h on it (in seven years--I know, I mostly used it for movies), but resolution is of course way better. It definitely has soft focus and perhaps a tad uneven, but even in the most focused areas the pixel structure is fairly subtle. I occasionally bring home one of our office projectors, a Dell M410HD business projector. While it's a veritable light volcano compared to the PA70G and also has as horizontal (as opposed to diagonal) picture structure, it also has considerably more pronounced screen door. I can (just barely) make out individual pixels even from 8-10 feet away, while on the LG they totally disappear at about 4-5ft. At a typical seating distance of 10-12 feet the PA70G appears completely smooth and extremely filmlike, which no noticeable stair stepping on almost horizontal/vertical lines. I had obsessed over whether 720p still made sense today, but considering that I can't see pixels past about 4ft having 1080p wouldn't seem to make much difference. I think for $399 this unit will tide me over nicely until affordable and brighter 1080p LED projectors hit the market.

Oh, one more thing regarding fan noise. On low and medium brightness the fan is a non-issue, but on bright it's really too loud to be acceptable. Even with decently cranked up dialog going on it's still distracting from about 6ft away. I think it's beyond the threshold where it would fade into the background. For me it's going to be an ultra-pure white screen and medium brightness along with ceiling mounting on a 10ft ceiling.