I don't want to usurp Bob's thread but I just got done playing around with mine for about at hour and thought I'd post my impressions vs. my ~4 month old LP350.
Right now I'm feeding my projectors with a Radeon equipped HTPC, 60 Hz refresh. WinDVD is my player of choice at the moment.
The absolute first thing I noticed was the sharpness. Why? Because my LP350 (and the first one I got which I returned) has an optics problem that makes it *impossible* to focus the entire picture. My current projector has essentially a 1 pixel wide green border around objects on the left edge of the picture. It's invisible while watching video, but is very noticeable when displaying a computer desktop. Drives me up the wall. I'm happy to say that the LT150 doesn't have this problem, nor should anyone really settle for a projector with this problem. I've sort of secretly been hoping for my LP350 bulb to blow so I can send it back again.
http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif I'll probably make them exchange it eventually anyway but I haven't gotten around to it yet, nor am I sure I'll get anything better anyway.
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Rainbows: I didn't see any more or less than my LP350. For some that may be damning with faint praise but I personally didn't feel I saw that many. Nor do they bother me all that much when they show up. I didn't watch anything that I know makes me see a lot of rainbow (Gladiator for some reason does this to me), but I did check out parts of the Mummy in which I do remember seeing quite a bit of rainbow when I first got my 350. I believe that calibration counts here though... I cut down on the rainbows a lot after I calibrated my 350 for the first time. I didn't calibrate the 150 yet, but I am using an HTPC which I've tweaked a little.
Brightness: I don't really notice a difference, that is I would imagine that the brightness on the 350 is turned down to the point where it's similar to the 150. I made no adjustments to the 150. I don't think I'd want to turn it down much more though. Don't plan on watching this with any lights on or anything.
Color: Sure looks great to me. Good "punch", although of course I've calibrated nothing. I would say it's an improvement on the 350 thus far, if calibration improves it any more it will be a marvel. I had the white section of the color wheel turned off and was using gamma setting Natural 1.
"Noise", "Crawlies", "Whatever": I took this thing into work today to show some interested friends and the only disc anyone had laying around was "Jumanji" and we had to feed it with a laptop. There was noticeable noisyness or crawlies. This evening however I noticed considerably less noise in the sky areas in the opening of the Mummy than I did on my 350. This is a bit of a pleasant surprise, but I really don't want to open the can of worms on this discussion again so I won't say any more on it.
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Black level: So here we go... the supposed holy grail, how does the LT150 stack up? I'd say: great! I'd also say my 350 performs admirably here as well though, so maybe folks should take my evaluation with a grain of salt. My take on black level, particularly with respect to DLPs, is that they *can* produce a fairly decent absolute black level. It's just that to acheive it for some reason you end up with no shadow detail at all. So you have to choose which one you want, inky blanks with big globs of shadow all over the screen, or greyish blacks but with my detail. In my quicky test the LT150 acheives a lower absolute black level while still maintaining detail. My quicky test is this: In the Mummy in the 3rd (? I think) chapter after the lead female character knocks down all the bookcases, she walks into a dark room lit by some torches. To the right of the archway she walks through is a patterned wall. On my 350 with the black level set where I like it, the pattern is invisible. Making it visible results in an unacceptable overall black level. On the 150 the pattern was visible. Like I said, a quicky test, but a pretty practical one that shows the real benefit of some of the tweaks available on the 150.
Other pros for the 150: Power on/off on the remote (yeah!), lots of knobs for tweaking, infrared sensor in front and behind, fan exhaust to the side so you can butt it up against the back wall of a room (well, except the cords plug into the back), CompactFlash slot is cool but I doubt I'll use it.
Cons: the only one I can think of is fan noise, which I consider to be a fixable problem and one I much rather have than something like my aforementioned optics problem with the 350 that I can't do anything about. The shorter throw/fixed zoom is a bit of a problem for me but I'll figure something out for that too.
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Stuff I haven't considered or don't care about: onboard scaler, HDTV.
All in all it's a definite improvement on the 350 as far as I'm concerned. I payed just under $4K for my 350 in March, even at $3K the 150 raises the bar considerably for what one should expect from a projector. For $1700 it's insane and I'm wishing I would have bought a couple more to use or give/sell to family members.
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