Was finally able to hook-up the new 1000ci over the weekend and watch a couple of movies. It replaced a 1000c that I had used for a few months in the same setup (9' wide 16:9 Firehawk; very good light control but there are white objects in the room and a white ceiling). Both projectors were viewed using factory settings with no calibration (the 1000c was almost dead on right out of the box using Avia and by the time there were enough hours on the bulb to do a professional calibration, I knew it was going to be replaced; I did not have time to run Avia on the new 1000ci).
Almost a month passed between viewing the two so the comparison is very impressionistic.
I watched 2 DVDs, Road to Perdition and Panic Room (Superbit). I had not viewed either of these on the 1000c or in a commercial theater. I will try to watch material that I am more familiar with in the near future and report back my impressions of any differences.
The most noticeable difference to me was black level. IMO the vx1000ci is slightly better than most film presentations in commercial theaters in terms of absolute black level. The 1000c was a little worse than film IMO.
For example, with the 1000c, I was bothered by the lack of horizontal masking on my screen when viewing 2:35 material. The dark gray of the unmasked portion of the screen made it obvious that the "black" in the picture was not really black. With the 1000ci, the unmasked portion is much closer to the black around the screen and not particularly distracting.
My impression is that the 1000ci is also better in regard to shadow detail but with the time lag between viewings, I can't say with any certainty if this is in fact the case as the differences are likely small.
I have connected a Zenith 520 to the 1000ci via both RGBHV and DVI and will try to do a comparison of those inputs for HD material in the next few days.
I will also experiment with the iris feature on the 1000ci to see how that impacts pq.
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Glade
