got mine this afternoon and burned about 10 hours off the bulb already (where did the time go??!).
my observations probably won't be worth much to most people since
1) i'm using a DIY screen of blackout material
and
2) just using an interlaced dvd signal thru s-video
with those two things in mind,
i'll say i was happily surprised by some qualities of this projector, and dissapointed but optimistic with some other areas.
to me the HUGE cool factor with this projector is the size.
the picture , while never horrible or unwatchable, just doesn't come close (at this point) to what i get from my digital Sony rptv. i am having a lot of problems calibrating the colors. a picture calibrated to display fine at one chapter, ends up looking blown-out 2 chapters later. i don't know how much if anything this has to do with the s-video connection. Most of the time, faces tend towards magenta, and yellow tends towards green.
maybe i just have to sit there and play with it a few more hours, but i've cycled thru all the gamma, temp, white balance settings 20 times already. as soon as i got the picture satisfactory for one movie, the next movie needing fixin'. i'm kinda worried if i bring up the menus anymore, it may blow a gasket.
hopefully most of this can be cured with a pro screen. i'll be asking for some hi-power samples first thing tomorrow.
the next big dissapointment i had was what i assume is either the scaling or deinterlacing of the picture. jagged edges, smearing, poor resolution, etc. From what everyone has said so far, i'm optimistic a p/s player (or less likely for me, a HTPC) will go a ways to rectifying this aspect.
one curious thing i've noticed is that non-anamorphic movies don't look all that much worse from anamorphic ones.
that is if they are 1.85 or less. WALKABOUT which is pretty dissapointing on the digital RP without a progressive player, actually looked pretty good on the pj, and not that much worse than some of the state-of-the-art anamorphic transfers.
the last big problem for me is , of all things....screendoor (!?)
from a little over 10' feet away, on a 80" wide screen i could make out the screendoor pretty frequently. this was usually really obvious during pans.
i'm glad i stoped dreaming about LCD's, if this is just a hint of the kind of image they have to deal with.
i would like to put in a 96" wide constant height/variable width screen, but this factor may prevent that. 80" is a nice step up from the 40" on my HS10, but if i could get up to a 96" , i don't think i'd ever go to a pay theater again.
the screendoor is dissapointing since it's one more thing that takes me out of the movie.
and now , ... the rainbows
- i do see them, and on some movies pretty frequently. The Thin Red Line had near constant rgb artifacts, along with X-Men and Gilda (one of my favorite B&W's), but then the clips from 12 Angry Men (another B&W Classic) played almost entirely rainbow free. probably because of the more extensive range of grays, whereas Gilda had some high contrast areas (black jackets w/ white shirts were a big source of of the problem).
all in all,somewhat less than i had feared, and in one case (Gladiator) MUCH, MUCH less than the $17000 Runco i saw.
inconsistent from scene to scene or movie to movie. They are starting to aggravate me. maybe its a psychological thing, and if i stop fighting them, and just learn to relax, they won't be so bad...it's gonna be hard.
i do miss the trade off in picture quality compared to my 53HS10. although i know i can get better eventually with the right additions and tweaks, there seems to be a sense of work when i sit down to watch something on this projector. It takes some effort not to be bothered by the rainbows or be distracted by screendoor, or to ignore the story while i try to rectify the picture settings for the current scene.
i'm looking forward to picking up some black fabric today because I KNOW some kind of matting system is going to add to the picture tremendously. it did with the rptv.
although it won't alleviate some of the other problems.
when i take into account that i paid $1000 less for this than i did for my RP just 6 months ago, and that i can have any size image i want, and if i need to, just pack it up and put it in the closet, well that just totally floors me.
Thanks to Grant & Tom ( and the guys at AVS for putting up with all these posts)and of course whoever screwed up at NEC or DEll.
i'm not completely sold on it yet. Between the intermitant rainbows and the problems calibrating color and the other picture settings, i haven't really, in the last 10 hrs of looking at images , been captivated enough to just get lost in the movie.
this did happen when i first got the RP. the large size can be awesome for certain scenes, but it seems like something always crops up eventually to take me 'out of the moment'. at this point i'd keep the NEC more for its size and portability, than for the image it produces. Frequently, even with s-vid, the image is pretty spectacular, but it's just so damned inconsistent.
[This message has been edited by ckolchak (edited 08-03-2001).]