New XGA Projector brand recommendations?

[mjl5007]

Wasn't sure if I should put this in the Buying Advice forum or here, so if I got it wrong, forgive me

We're looking into replacing a projector that isn't bright enough for our room, and I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations on particular brands/manufacturers we should lean towards? There are so many out there, and I know there can be big variations across manufacturers in terms of picture quality, but I don't know which ones are regarded as the "better ones".

So far I've looked into Panasonic (which is what we have now), Sanyo, and NEC. I know there are at least a dozen others, and they cover a huge budget range. We're looking for something in the $3,000-$6,000 range (including lens), *maybe* up to $7,000, with the following capabilities:

- 4:3 aspect (so, almost definitely XGA (1024x768 )
- Throw distance: 31'
- Screen size: 180" (12'w x 9'h)
- Brightness: at least 4,000 *actual* lumens. This is tricky; our existing projector is rated at 3,200 lumens, but is only putting out about 1,700 right now (measured with a foot-candle lightmeter using the full-white test screen). Obviously if it were putting out the full 3,200 we probably wouldn't need to replace it, and I understand that the "rated brightness" on projector spec sheets must be taken with a grain of salt, as that's usually the maximum possible brightness with the lamp on "high", static images, ideal input resolution, etc etc.
- Will be used almost exclusively for moving video (as opposed to static images like PowerPoint, song lyrics, etc).

We will likely also be investing in a scaler so we can send native 1024x768 to the projector via DVI all the time, since a dedicated hardware scaler will almost certainly give better results than sending non-native resolution to the projector and letting the projector do the scaling, correct?

Finally, we'll be hanging it from the ceiling, so we're looking for an installation projector, not the more portable table-top types.

Obviously brands like Barco are out of the question, but what about ones like Mitsubishi, BenQ, Optoma, InFocus, Canon, Samsung, LG, Eiki, Epson, Sharp, Toshiba, ViewSonic, Vivitek, etc?

[Paris MkVI]

May not be the right choice for you - our needs are different. We recently decided that these Sharp units were the right units for us to install in auditorium 2. We're looking at different aspect ratio. But they may have something else in the line that would be right for you.

[petereit]

I have been very pleased with our Hitachi CP-WX625 projectors. We have four in our sanctuary and two in our Children's church. Though they're actually WXGA, they're plenty bright and in your price range.

And for the future, they also have HDMI inputs, so they're ready if you want to go HD some time down the road.

[mjl5007]

You know, we are planning to eventually move to HD (although probably only 720p at first), and I had been waffling on whether to get a new XGA projector or a WXGA projector. Either way we'd like to be able to keep the projector when we move to widescreen/HD, at least for a little while, so getting an XGA projector would mean letterboxing when we go widescreen, but a WXGA would mean pillarboxing now (since we're still showing 4:3) *until* we go widescreen (at which point we'd be using the full projected image)

Going XGA, I was thinking that when we switched to widescreen we would shift the projector down so the bottom of the letterboxed video image aligns with the bottom of the screen, and the bottom black letterbox would be off the bottom of the screen; what I'm hoping is that the projector will have good enough blacks so that you can't actually see the bottom black letterbox being projected off the bottom of the screen and onto the back wall/floor of the stage behind the screen.

But now that I think about it, we could do the 'opposite' and get a WXGA projector, and for the time being zoom the image larger than the physical screen so the pillarboxed 4:3 image fills the width of our screen, with the left and right black pillarboxes projecting off the sides of the screen, and then when we go widescreen just zoom back down so the full widescreen projected image fits the screen.

Of course, this all depends on the projector having good enough blacks that the black bars being projected off the screen onto the back wall/stage aren't visible. Do you think that's possible, or is any projector we get going to show too much light in black areas and make it obvious that we're projecting off the edges of the screen, even if it's all black? Too bad there's no easy way to test any candidate projectors before buying to see how well that would work...

[petereit]

Even if it's not "formal HD", I'm guessing your projection computer will easily support one of the resolutions that fill the the projector's 16:10 ratio using a standard VGA cable.

Our wide "screens" are nothing but sheets of drywall painted white. They work awesome!

[Brad Weber]

Originally Posted by mjl5007

But now that I think about it, we could do the 'opposite' and get a WXGA projector, and for the time being zoom the image larger than the physical screen so the pillarboxed 4:3 image fills the width of our screen, with the left and right black pillarboxes projecting off the sides of the screen, and then when we go widescreen just zoom back down so the full widescreen projected image fits the screen.

Your 4:3 image would fill the screen height when pillarboxed so if you zoomed out to get that to fill the width the image would also extend beyond the top and bottom.

One thing about pillarboxing 4:3 images on a widescreen projector rather than letterboxing widescreen images on a 4:3 projector is that with the former the image height, and thus the viewing distance, remains constant. Whether a 4:3 or widescreen image is projected, the image height is the same.

You could also look at a 16:10 or 15:9 aspect ratio projector as sort of an intermediate option. A little bit closer to 4:3 than 16:9 but not far off of 16:9.

A 9' high image with a 31' throw distance looks like it will require a long throw lens. There are a lot of options that support that, but the significant issue may be how it affects the price. It looks like you may have to spend $1,700 to $2,500 or so for the lens itself. That puts your budget for the projector at $500 to $4,300, which then limits the options. Just for some idea, http://www.projectorcentral.com/proj...sort=%24&sz=15. I filled in some of your criteria and added the zoom lens and vertical lens shift, which I typically recommend, but the list includes all aspect ratios and resolutions. Although the parameters allowed for brighter projectors, with the budget set the rated outputs all fall between 4,000 and 6,000 lumens.

[VoltNHalf]

I'd stay well away from the Vivitek projectors. Customer support for these is practically non-existant. I've got one of their DLP projectors (still within warranty) with about 110 hours of total use that has several dozen dead pixels, and I've been trying for over a week to get someone from their support group to simply respond! Quite frustrating...

[mjl5007]

Originally Posted by Brad Weber

Your 4:3 image would fill the screen height when pillarboxed so if you zoomed out to get that to fill the width the image would also extend beyond the top and bottom.

I'm not 100% following what you're trying to say here -- perhaps I wasn't clear in my original description of what I was talking about doing. Here's a quick drawing:

The green outline represents our 4:3 physical screen. The yellow area represents a 4:3 image pillarboxed in a 16:10 (WXGA 1280x800) image, sized so that the 4:3 image fills the physical screen, and the black rectangles to the sides of the yellow are the pillarboxes, which would project off the sides of the physical screen. Since our screen is 12'x9', by my calculations, that would mean I would need a 14.4'-wide 16:10 image in order for the 4:3 pillarboxed portion to be 12'x9' and fill our screen.

One issue with this idea is that in 'oversized' mode, the portion of the full projected image taken up by the 4:3 pillarboxed video would only be about 83% of the full image, which means we'd effectively only get 83% of the rated lumen output in that configuration. But, with a projector rated at 5,500+ lumens, that's still ~4580 lumens or higher, which would still be a big improvement over our existing projector.

My biggest concern with this idea, however, is whether the black pillarboxes being projected off the sides of the physical screen and onto the stage behind the screen will be bright enough (that is, not true black) that they'll be visible to the congregation -- if so, that would probably look hokey and unprofessional. But, if the projector's black levels are good enough, it might not be visible at all (particularly with a little bit of ambient light like we have) and it might work out really well. I understand that DLP projectors tend to have much better black levels and overall contrast vs LCDs and are generally better for video, but they also suffer from the 'rainbow effect', and supposedly they also require more lumens to get equivalent rich color reproduction compared to an otherwise-equivalent LCD. Thoughts?

As for requiring a special lens, yeah, I realized that -- although some of the candidates, for example the Sanyo PLC-WM5500S, come with a standard zoom lens with a throw ratio range that would cover both a 14.4'-wide 'oversized' image (33' / 14.4' = 2.29 throw ratio) and a 12'-wide 'properly sized for the screen width' image (33' / 12' = 2.75 throw ratio). Unless someone tells me otherwise, I'm leaning heavily towards that particular unit right now, although I am curious if the seemingly-identical Christie LW555 is actually an identical unit, or if it might be slightly better in some way (for example, the literature on the Christie mentions Dynamic Iris control, whereas ProjectorCentral's data on the Sanyo says 'Variable Iris: No', but also says that the Sanyo is marketed as the Christie LW555, which would seem to suggest that they're identical).

[Brad Weber]

Sorry, I misunderstood and thought you were thinking of zooming out such that the 4:3 projector filled the width of the wide format screen.

Any of the 'black' from pillarboxing is not going to be absolute black. Of course the biggest variable is how 'black' the surface that hits is to start with and the properties of that surface. The same black from the projector may look very different on a flat, non-reflective black surface with lots of ambient light hitting it than it does on lighter, reflective surface with no ambient light washing it out.

Sanyo OEMs a number of products for Christie and the basic specs are often identical. However, that does not mean everything is identical, for example I believe that Christie typically uses their own lenses, and there may be other differences in different products.

[mjl5007]

Just wanted to give a quick update on this topic, and let everyone know that we ended up going with the Sanyo PLC-XM100L projector with the LNS-S20 lens -- they came as a package deal from B&H. It is a 5,000 lumen XGA/4:3 projector.

We couldn't be happier with this projector. The image is *much* brighter than the 3,200-lumen-rated Panasonic PT-F100NTU that it replaced, and the power zoom/lens shift made adjusting it to fit our screen a breeze. We hung it from the existing universal ceiling mount bracket with no trouble. We did find that the projector introduced a not-imperceptible amount of delay to the video signal, resulting in our video being slightly behind the audio (which runs directly to the house PA system) and causing lip-sync issues when we play back sermons via DVD. We set the Video Delay adjustment setting on the projector to "Mid", which turns off some of the extra processing in the projector, and that helped significantly. We may have to turn the setting up to HIGH, but that disables keystone correction and would require us to re-adjust the projector to be hitting the screen square, which is a bit of extra work.

The only problem we're having with the projector now is that we can't get it to connect to our network so we can control it via web browser, but I'm fairly certain it's not a defect in the projector but rather something we've got misconfigured in the rest of our network. We've got the projector configured to lease an IP address from the router via DHCP, but for some reason the projector's DHCP-Discover requests are getting dropped at the switch and aren't making it to the router. We've mirrored the port on the switch that the projector is plugged into in order to do a packet capture with a laptop, and the packets are indeed coming into the switch; they're just not going out to the router. Oddly enough, we can plug other pieces of equipment into the same switch port and they can get DHCP addresses from the router no problem.

Anyway, thanks everyone for your input!

[Stever]

Can you set up a static address and browse to it? Maybe use a crossover cable and direct connect just to check. Some of the early versions of that model did have a webserver problem can you check the firmware version if its 1.00 it may need an upgrade. Good luck!

[mjl5007]

The thought to assign a static IP and check direct connection via crossover cable did cross my mind, but I didn't have a crossover cable with me the last time I was troubleshooting.

I don't remember for certain, but I think the firmware version might actually be 1.00; I will check on Thursday evening the next time I'm at the church. I assume I just go to the Network Information page where it shows the MAC address, it's listed there, correct? If it does need an upgrade, is that something we can do ourselves or does it require a dealer visit? I'm not sure if there is a local dealer anywhere around here, like I said we ordered it online from B&H.

Regardless, though, I am getting DHCP Discover packets at the switch from the projector; they're just not getting past the switch to the router. It seems like that's a problem with the switch, not the projector, but I could be wrong.