I just realized that you already posted in my PicoAir thread. I think there was no activity for a couple of days, so I stopped watching it. Funny that such a lengthy discussion still developed. Have yet to read it.
I don't believe the L1 is direct laser, a better comparison would be the microvision show wx and show wx+.
Check out the end of this video - looks like black is really black there too:
It's not even about the size of the image for me, if I could find a em focus crt projector or a recent panasonic plasma on the used market here I wouldn't even be considering this projector.
Huh... and here I thought there were still plenty of decent CRT projectors available all across Northern America.
The only thing available here with a decent black level at the moment for the price range is bulky crt rear projection sets, and I live on the third floor of an apartment complex
So? Pay two guys $40 to haul it up there for you if you don't want to do it yourself.
Also, this review of the L1 doesn't really give me much confidence about the lumen spec:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364150,00.asp
Yes, that doesn't sound good.
By the way, I just measured my current CRT projector and while it may have max. 700 lumen theoretically, I came up with a lot less. I wonder whether made a mistake in my calculations.
I took this here as a guide:
http://www.dnp-screens.com/DNP08/Technology/Basic-Visual/What-is-light/Luminance.aspx
To get the following formula (in case somebody will search for this in the future - unless I'm mistaken, this is the formula for converting cd/m² to lumen, assuming a perfect white surface (which distorts my measurement a bit but probably not by more than 5% or so):
cd/m² * 3.14 = lux
lux * area in m² = lumen
So: cd/m² * 3.14 * area m² = lumen
Which resulted in the following for me (screen size 2.11m²):
Projection size 100%: 23 cd/m² => 23 * 3.14 * 2.11 = 152 lumen
Projection size 50%: 36 cd/m² => 36 * 3.14 * 1.05 = 118 lumen
Projection size 10%: 34 cd/m² => 34 * 3.14 * 0.2 = 21 lumen
Hm... I thought that something doesn't seem right about this but now I wonder... is it maybe that the CRT reaches it's max. output per m² at something like 50% (didn't test 60%, 70%, etc.) already, so if the projection window gets even smaller, the output simply doesn't go up any more?