Why have a 4:3 screen for a 16:9 front video projector? Because you can zoom in to make 4:3 material B-I-G, that’s why. Here are a couple of photos of the Panasonic PT-AX200U picture, zoomed in to fill the screen, taken from the couch. The image is about 75 inches diagonal. This Superman TV show is on DVD…
… and this spectacular image of Paulette Goddard’s breathtaking face is from a FiOS recording of “Modern Times.”
I’ll get back to posting something of interest once I’ve returned to work and have shaken off the holiday brain fog. But first, here are a couple of pictures of the remodeled porch as it looks now, after painting and the addition of some furniture. We’re still looking for a coffee table and side table.
If you click to look at the full-size picture with the TV, you’ll see it has an old-fashioned rabbit ear antenna. On February 17, 2009, analog broadcast television in the United States will cease. Long before then I plan to have a FiOS set top box installed. Or I could run a coaxial cable to the porch myself and use the analog signal provided over FiOS to watch the same local stations the antenna receives. I suppose it’s possible Verizon will shut off the analog service, although they’re under no requirement to do that.
P.S. According to this item, cable TV companies will keep their analog signals for local stations until 2012.
The video projector is addicting, and I’m watching too much TV! Last night it was the NE Patriots game — and I’m not even a football fan. Tonight, ABC is showing The Sound of Music in HD. I added a back light to give a sense of how it looks. Not huge by projection standards, but just right for the room, which isn’t as dark as the camera makes it seem after adjusting the exposure for the bright screen.
Hey, look who it is! Angela Cartwright, whose name came up in this past post. When I was a kid, besides the huge crush on Angela that I’ve already admitted having from when she was on Lost In Space with Bill Mumy, I thought it was funny that her name was the same as the fictional Cartwrights on Bonanza.
Yikes! At the moment, the home team NE Patriots have fallen way behind the NY Giants, 28-16. Not good. The Pats are supposed to remain undefeated! But at least the game looks terrific in projected HDTV. Eric’s hand shows the size of the picture.
P.S. Whew! They did it. Tom Brady may be a jerk for not marrying the mother of his child, but he’s sure good at his job.
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.
If you click here, you can see a tiny bit of one of the days that was lost in the database mess that happened last spring, captured by Archive.org.
I know exactly how the database attack happened, and how I could have dealt with it better than I did, but so it goes. The page on Archive.org is unformatted, and there are no pictures, but if you’re lucky the audio players will work.
