Someone please talk me out of upgrading my Nec 6PG Extra

I've OWNED the following 9" crt projectors, none of which I personally would "upgrade" a finely tuned PG Extra to. Ampro 4600, Sony 1292, NEC GP5000, Marquee 9501. There is one I would upgrade to, but I won't mention it as it would just beg too many questions.

Keep your present pj. If its been tweaked and tweaked, the difference between its picture and that of a 9" is negligable, and not worth the HUGE price that you would most likely have to pay. Give your pj a few years of use, and keep your eyes open for a great deal on a 9" pj. When one falls into your lap, that will be the time to "upgrade". In the meantime, look at as many as you can in person, you may not be impressed enough to even go to the trouble. Changing brands means going to either MEC(Ampro, Barco and Electrohome) or Sony(Barco, Sony)tubes, both of which have different color characteristics you may not be thrilled with.

All that being said though, I personally, like having the BIGGEST projector possible, this usually means having a 9" crt. Luckily my 1208S/2 is a monster, and keeps that desire at bay.

Keep your PG Extra, its the distillation of all that is good about that entire line of projector, it is a pinnacle machine, very difficult to upgrade, and I don't think you'd see a "dramatic" change in pic quality no matter WHAT projector you changed to.

Do a full out, ground up, no holds barred, mechanical and electronic setup on it. That might hold off the "upgrade" demons.

Paul,

Quote:
It's not the one with the Frensel lens and the huge 21" TV (which is way bigger than even the 9 inchers) that drives it, is it?


Romy101,


Based upon your posts now and in the past, forget the upgrade and have it properly calibrated (ISF'ed) by one of the better NEC-oriented calibrators. I won't recommmend any, as I've got one of the best, just down the street, and don't really know others personally, but there are dozens of posts about these guys.


That money will be much better than an upgrade and Doing-It-Yourself. Also, if you got money you want to spend, consider darkening the room, changing the screen, improving the sound (My personal opinion is that good surround sound increases the enjoyment much more than increasing screen size or brightness


If your tubes are toast, then have them changed 1st.


My NEC 9PG Xtra seems more than enough, and I have seen the best-of-the best.


Regards,


Ira

You''ll know you're done with the setup of your PG Extra IF:

All colors have the exact same width of line in internally generated test patterns.

All of those lines are soooo fine you marvel at that every time you bring up the patterns(and start doing that just to look at how good they are !)

When you converge a color on top of another, you can't tell where the separate colors are, EXCEPT by misconverging it a tiny bit.

Your convergence is ROCK steady right from turn on, corner to corner, top to bottom, side to side.

Your focus is PERFECTLY uniform and virtually perfect(able to see individual pieces of the fine dots in the fine dot test pattern) for ALL THREE COLORS, across the entire screen, top to bottom, side to side and corner to corner.

When you have done all of this, you can get a coloromiter and do and EXACT white balance for perfect D6500.

With this kind of setup, you'd likely embarass all but the pro setup and tweaked 9" crt's.