I was visiting local home theater/stereo stores here in San Francisco and to my surprise found that SF Stereo on Market St has both the Dwin Transvision and Madrigal D-ILA in demo rooms. Both are hooked up to some nice high end B&W Nautilus and Dynaudio speaker systems and Proceed DVD players. Unfortunately, the D-ILA is playing on a Stewart screen that is having a lot of problems with 'sparklies', but the manager was hoping to get a Greyhawk installed shortly.
Given that the Madrigal is supposed to be a tweaked G-15 (according to the guy in the store, Madrigal gets the top 15% from the production line which probably equates to no bad pixels), I found Dean McManis' calibrated G15 much more satisfying to watch. Undoubtedly the screen makes a difference, but since the price is almost 3x that of the G15 without calibration, I know for sure that there is not 3x the performance out of the box. It seems pretty obvious that Madrigal is to D-ILA what Runco is to DLP. From what I could see the only difference between this and a G15 is the colour of the two-tone plastic cover.
On a positive note its good to know these units are now becoming much easier to audition and to make purchasing decisions on 1st hand experience.
Given that the Madrigal is supposed to be a tweaked G-15 (according to the guy in the store, Madrigal gets the top 15% from the production line which probably equates to no bad pixels), I found Dean McManis' calibrated G15 much more satisfying to watch. Undoubtedly the screen makes a difference, but since the price is almost 3x that of the G15 without calibration, I know for sure that there is not 3x the performance out of the box. It seems pretty obvious that Madrigal is to D-ILA what Runco is to DLP. From what I could see the only difference between this and a G15 is the colour of the two-tone plastic cover.
On a positive note its good to know these units are now becoming much easier to audition and to make purchasing decisions on 1st hand experience.