Thought Id post a lil something after being inspired by naughty and W( at )RP( at )T}{ 's home theatre threads Suppose mine goes into the low end spectrum of home cinema, compared to those, but you don’t often see the visual side, of things And besides I just bought my first camera (not intentionally but who can resist a new DSC P200 for 2.3k!)I am a total noob at photography, so I decided this might be a good place to start! Slowly learning as you will notice, although it seems I am still making the camera look bad Never realise how difficult low light shots can be! Here goes, so bare with me

On a side note, if the res on these pics are a bit too high, let me know - cos working on this viewsonic 1024x1280 everything below, looks tiny to me.


Ok here is my "home theatre" setup, nothing fancy or anything just your plain PC. Jazz 9440B 5.1 speakers, 19" Viewsonic 8ms, 6800 GT GS ect ect. The fun starts when the lights go out...



Browsing from a far Makes the 19" screen looks really tiny doesnt it? So who is the lil critter thats making all that darn light? Wish Zalman made the reserator 10cm shorter though



Bought the Epson EMP TW10 couple of months back, mainly because of its extremely low total cost of ownership. The specs on the box isn't anything shattering with only 8x6 res its def an entry level projector, but for only 6k it satisfies my needs, 3000 hours of lamp life in theatre black mode( at )R1800 a lamp, with a 3 year warrantee I think its a killer deal. I still need to mount it somewhere, but for now I just move it where I need it One nice thing bout it is it can be fairly close, a 2m image can be projected from just 2m away! I thought bout getting a screen maybe later on, but for now I have just painted the wall a non gloss white Doesn’t work too bad, for now.


some nfsu, gr8 fun with a Logitech cordless game pad! And if I get too close motion sickness... Not recommended when alcohol levels are high


Thats also one of nfsu taken with the flash on, so you can get an idea how big this thing really goes


How bout a bit of far cry! The Epson really shines [no pun intended] in total darkness, its not much good when there’s a lot of light in the room, doesnt really bother cos its mostly used at night,and with closed curtains during the day.


Finally some movie action, even those erm downloaded svcd telesyncs of your vacaction on naboo looks better when blown up to 2x2.5m!

Love to seem some of you other folks projector/cinema setups, please post! For aspiring ppl looking to buy home projetors, I think its def worth it, although theres not much info on the topic except for the extreme critical reviews,I had a hard time to decide if I should do this or not. If some1 is unsure or need to see more, let me know - ive got a ton of pics, and ill even post some video clips if there is demand

It takes gaming and movies to the next level

Very nice setup. When i saw the second picture i thought it was a close-up of your LCD. My camera can't take night shots at all.

One other thing is that I never realised that 17" LCDs and 19" LCDs have the same optimum resolution. My 17" runs at 1280x1024 aswell and the Viewsonic website confirms this for both 17" and 19" LCDs. Interesting...

The best projector setup I've ever seen:

A friend of the family had a lovely double story house in a terrible area (near Joburg city, not too far from Ellis Park). It was practically surrounded by nothing but high rise buildings and right nextdoor to a medium sized flat, probably no bigger than 10 floors. The building's entire side was clear from his backyard, it was pretty much just a plain wall with no obstructions (windows or pipes etc.) and he painted it with the caretaker of that building's permission.
He then used the wall as his screen for the projector he ran off his balcony. I can't even think of how big that image must've been. People from the surrounding buildings could watch. It really was a perfect setup and I wish i had pictures.

Needless to say, it was a perfect house in a very bad location, he made a major loss on his house when it eventually got sold, there wasn't even a hope for breaking even considering how done up it was. That type of thing makes you wish you could literally move house sometimes.

Thanks hikizume, I was looking at the pics last night and if I didn’t take them myself id call a Photoshop job! It’s strange but with the night mode the Sony doesn’t show the screen door effect at all? Suppose it over compensates, cos they all look silky smooth! When working on the projector it’s a bit annoying at first, but after bout 10 minutes or so your eyes gets used to it.

The lcd panel, erm honestly its become a love hate relationship, yes max res is the same as the 17" which makes the dot pitch slightly higher, so images appear less sharp, after switching from the 17" I noticed the smaller icons being "jaggy" but I have been using it for a month so I don't notice it anymore. I still play rts and rpgs on the lcd they just don’t feel right on the projector, recently started ground control again and I have to turn up the contras to the max or I just cant see anything in darkness, turning up in game gamma just makes the screen over bright with a greyish tone. It’s a bit of a hassle when back in windows I have to turn it down again, since it’s over bright. Watching movies on it, is also not an option for me, since the picture is so sharp every little encoding flaw is amplified, DVDs seem to be ok but anything of less quality looks terrible. Since its using a TN panel, I think it must be only 6 bit, although some Viewsonic resellers claim its 8 bit. I picked up something strange last night and I seem unable to reproduce it today, with some of the night shots there’s an extreme amount of black to grey colour detail - and in there I get a flickering pixel? It just goes from white to black - on/off the whole time. Closing the image, it stops and goes on like nothing happened. When doing a dead pixel test, nothing turned up. Moving the image to the other side of the screen made another pixel on that side flicker on off in exactly the same spot of black/grey? Weird, it’s as if it didn’t know what colour it should be? But today I can’t replicate it, strange. In the beginning I loved it, but now I am not so sure, maybe I should have gotten a better quality 17” instead?

Projecting to the side of a building from a balcony, that must have been an awesome sight! Wish I could try that, but the largest building in town, is 2 storey He should have sold it for more than he bought it, cos it had HUGE advertising potential! how much is a billboard that size worth to a company never mind a fully functional screen? I’ve been toying with the idea of getting one for my store, putting it on a 2 hour timer every night to display promotions ect.

I noticed that with my LCD aswell. It's tolerable because i have a 17" CRT as my primary display and the LCD as a secondary.
I find it great for applications and work usage because of the larger workspace. When i had two LCDs running my main problem was similar to yours - dark areas show up cloudy and granular and it sucked compromising on the realism of an image by turning up the settings to a given extreme, so i changed to what i have now - best of both . The only problem now is that you can't apply ClearType to only one of the monitors, with it on the text on my CRT monitor is blurred and with it off the text on my LCD is aliased.

It was actually pretty sad, like i said lovely house - terrible location. It was extremely hard finding a buyer because no-one wanted to invest near/in the city. It would be pretty interesting if an advertising agency bought a double story house just for the advertising potential, it could even have been a branch of that agency too.

well mine is entry level and robs is the stuff that dreams are made off in terms of the audio - and we both started off with logitech Z680's - so you are definitely going in the right direction

looking like a great setup and im pretty impressed with the reserator as a commercial concept - and id really love to get a bigass projector like you have - the problem as you have picked up is that the ones with the correct specifications to play during the day and also to be able to give a great picture at the correct resolutions are on the expensive side still - but thats gonna be my next move too and seeing your setup has meade me feel like getting it sooner rather than later but im becoming a cheap bastard so ill prolly just wait for prices to drop further

nevertheless im sure you enjoy having the massive screen capability despite the shortcomings - now just add in a TV card so that you have a complete multimedia station there (thats how i wanted to do it initially)

also heres another of my bright ideas for you - i notice that you have the same logitech cordless keyboard and mouse as myself - now if your chair (the leather one i see in the first pic) has some wheels and also has armrests then you can make an extesion on the armrests to support a platform that you can build out of light solid wood or thick perspex to actually host the keyboard and mouse so that you can wheel the chair to anywhere you like and still use the keyboard and mouse and other gaming controllers - thats more or less what im planning to do when i do get the projector - so the chair finishes of like a disabled persons wheelchair but is a portable multimedia control station - and you can just spread your speakers a bit further apart

but well really i do hope that you are having great fun with that setup ........ im sure i would be

hikizume, running dual would be the problem solver for me 2, not considered it yet, although I wish there was one screen that could do everything These Viewsonics are highly ranked amongst LCDs and I am sad to say they still fall short of a total CRT replacement. In the end if you’re used to both, it seems the one can’t replace the other

naughty thanks that’s a brilliant idea regarding the chair, haven’t thought bout that! It’s got no wheels, yet but I just checked there’s enough space to drill holes and fit 4 wheels on the steel frame, I could prob get those small office chair wheels at a local diy store Making a Perspex extension for the arm rest wont be 2 hard either since its got a nice thick steel/metal frame, to mount it.

I am fairly impressed with the tw10s performance now, cos luckily I haven’t seen the higher end stuff in action to use as a measuring stick But a bigger resolution would