I’m Projecting Again

Happy post-Christmas letdown! Well, we took the big step at our house, and have gone Def. High Def. HDTV. A great deal of thought has gone into this over the past year, and it wouldn’t have happened this year if a particular product hadn’t made an appearance.

One of the blog posts that was lost in the great database debacle last spring told of my friend across the street getting a 50-inch Panasonic plasma TV. As impressed as I was by the picture, I decided it wouldn’t be big enough for what I wanted, and that was when I decided to go with front projection technology. There was also a nostalgic yearning to return to my glory days as an A/V boy in elementary school, during the time when I had my Kenner Super Show at home.

I set out to go HD in a big way — 65″ diagonal for 16:9 — on the cheap. I already had a tripod screen, obtained for free from work a few years ago, after ceiling-mounted, motorized screens were installed. The screen happened to be exactly the size that would fit in the TV room for a 65″ picture, and that saved me $100-$200.

I found a $40 TV shelf at Target that looked like it would work to mount a projector, but what about the projector itself? It had to be LCD, because I’m very susceptible to the rainbow effect caused by the spinning color wheel in single-chip DLP projectors, and to keep the price low I knew that 1080 was out of the question. I wanted to get something that was a clear stand-out for the money, but there wasn’t anything until the Panasonic PT-AX200U, a 720p projector, appeared a few months ago for $1299.

Projector People had the 200U for $50 off with free shipping. Projector People is very good to deal with, and if you’re buying a front projector I recommend them highly; however, I found 50-ft. HDMI and component video cables elsewhere for a lot less. Another Christmas addition to the house is an XBox 360 for Eric. Here’s how it looks with the lights on…

… and how it looks with the lights off.

The 200U uses Epson’s 3LCD engine. I won’t bore you with the details, but my 200U displays the usual 3LCD drawbacks, so the picture isn’t perfect. Nevertheless, it looks great! But let me qualify that by adding that HDTV on FiOS looks great — when it’s true HD — and well-made DVD’s look almost as good. Everything else looks big, but that’s all. Regular TV and good, ol’ Laserdiscs are only so-so at best on the 200U. My recommendation is, if you want to watch TV, watch TV.

As I said, I wanted to do home theater on the cheap, so besides the projector my only out-of-pocket expenses were a couple of long cables and the shelf. Not having a wall handy, I used cable ties to secure the bracket to a post in the finished basement, where I already had one of the surround sound speakers. Looks a bit funky, but it works.

Our nine-year-old TV is now on the porch, after my friend from the across the street helped me lug all 168 pounds of it upstairs. I helped carry his plasma out of the store and into his house last spring, but it weighed only half as much, so I owe him something for his trouble and effort.

I’m happily back where I began with the Kenner Super Show! Now if only FiOS would add more HD channels to their basic line-up, which they should do because they recently increased the monthly rate for the HDTV DVR. Meanwhile, I will continue to sit out the stupid format war between HD-DVD (my pick) and Blu-Ray.

P.S. I almost forgot! A while back I posted a picture of David Letterman and said I would have more to say about it. I didn’t get that photo off the Net, I took it during my first test of the projector.