More of my urgent retirement time-wasting has been accomplished with my 60″ 4:3 video projector arrangement in the living room. The screen was a freebie from work, and the new-old stock Viewsonic projector was a $65 eBay acquisition. Upon arrival, the only thing that showed its age was the projector’s rotting air filter foam, that was easily replaced with some foam I had on hand. With a TV tray table and a $25 Bluetooth speaker, I can set everything up — and take it all down — in just a few minutes.
The trick to getting the best picture is watching everything with my laptop computer, so the projector runs in its native 1024×768 resolution. The laptop has the now-rare feature of a VGA connector, and the projector’s inputs are analog-only, including VGA. (Tech note: native VGA is required on the laptop, because copy protection prevents HDMI-to-VGA conversion from working.) Being an early 3-LCD design, the claim was, “vibrant, true-to-life images with better color brightness and a wider color gamut.” (Better than sequential DLP color was what they were implying.) I connected my X-Rite ColorMunki Display meter to the laptop and ran free DisplayCal software. The results live up the manufacturer’s claim. The resolution and color profile are adjusted automatically when connecting the VGA cable to the laptop.
Being intended for business presentations, the projector’s contrast ratio isn’t good enough for modern dark shows and movies. But this quirky, inexpensive, cobbled-together setup is perfect for my intended purpose of watching old cartoons and TV shows streaming over WiFi, or with a USB DVD drive I’ve had for years. It’s fun to realize how much video projection had progressed in the 20 years since the Kloss Novabeam of the mid-80’s.
