1080p Projectors
Posted by: Allan Probin on 20 October 2007
I'm starting to feel the need for a projector upgrade. I'm currently using an Optoma H79 720p DLP which I've had for a couple of years now. It throws a pretty good image and I've always said I wouldn't be interested in changing it until something came along that had twice the pixels, double the contrast ratio, was quieter and displayed more accurate colours. Oh, and it has to be cheaper as well!. Things have moved on tremendously in the last few years and I think that time has now come.
The surprising thing is that the projector that has caught my attention is an LCD unit, the Panasonic PT-AE2000. I had an LCD projector about four years ago and frankly after I'd compared it to DLP I thought there was no going back. LCD at the time generally suffered issues with screen-door, dead pixels, dust blobs in the light path, colour uniformity and mis-convergence. On all these counts DLP had the upper hand and when comparing images from the two - DLP had better clarity, sharpness and image depth. I don't suffer from rainbow effect that some people do with DLP so for me it was no contest really. So it comes as a bit of a shock to be contemplating going back to LCD again.
This projector should be available in the shops in about two or three weeks and I'm arranging to go and have a look at one and compare it to a good 1080p DLP unit, hopefully the Sim2 D80e. The Sim2 costs over twice as much as the Panasonic but I want to see if the difference is worth it or if the gap has narrowed in favour of LCD's better value. A couple of guys over on the AVS forum went to have a look at the Panasonic and had some very positive things to say about it ("Color: Absolutely beautiful. Color1 PERFECTLY renders REC 709 colors. No other device has come close except on a professionally calibrated CRT pro monitor. Gamma: The gamma on the Pearl is also no comparison to the 2000. Even on a unit I saw which had the gamma corrected, the 2000, was way better. Auto Iris: ... is pretty much undetectable. I'm very sensitive to any kinds of resolution pumping, brightness compression, and fluctuating brightness. I saw none of those with the 2000. Uniformity: I saw perfect uniformity. I'm very sensitive to that...On the 2000, there was no banding or differences in color brightness from the center, edges or corners that I noticed or could see.") Link to the full write-up is here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=920561Style wise - it looks a little reminiscent of a CD555 (and about the same size):
RRP is £1,995 in the UK. Anyone having similar thoughts or have any experiences with up-to-date LCD vs DLP comparisons?
Allan
Posted on: 29 November 2007 by tonym
I'm having a home demo of the latest SIM2 HT380
tomorrow.
My current HT300 XTRA-H's really fine, but just out of curiosity, as this seemed the most obvious upgrade should I wish to do so, only academic interest, etc. etc...
Posted on: 29 November 2007 by Allan Probin
Nice, I really like the SIM2 projectors
I'd be very interested to hear what you think after you've done the demo.
Posted on: 01 December 2007 by tonym
I had the demo yesterday. There was a bit of a glitch because the HT380 struggled to lock onto the output from my Lumagen. By a process of elimination we traced this down to a dodgy DVI - HDMI convertor plug the chaps had brought along with them.
for source we used my trusty old Oppo DVD player, SkyHD (both through my Lumagen HDQ processor), and a hard drive server which contained "Proper" HD 1080P video samples.
In comparison to my 300 the picture was definitely brighter and colours, particularly reds, looked more realistic. Blacks were blacker and the contrast was greater. It wasn't night and day stuff but to be fair we used it more-or-less out of the box. I usually set up my displays with "Digital Video Essentials" which can make an appreciable difference, but unfortunately I had to impose some unforseen time constraints. Nevertheless it was pretty impressive.
Chris from SIM2 had come along for the afternoon, and just happened to have an HT3000 with him...
This was a different beast - a much brighter image and better in every way - even SWMBO commented the picture "Looked good". Quite a complement! The 1080p material was extremely impressive, albeit featuring subjects that would flatter any display. The difference was very apparent when I wired up my 300, which suddenly looked dull and lacking in contrast.
Unlike the 380 which looks physically identical to my 300, the 3000 is a bigger bit of kit with more connection options.
So, what to do? the 3000 is considerably more expensive than the 380, but is significantly better. to put it in perspective it's less than two-thirds the cost of a 555. still bloody dear though!
I haven't made up my mind what to do, but I suspect the longer I leave it the less inclined I'll be to change. My trusty old 300 looked pretty good again after a night's viewing!
Posted on: 01 December 2007 by Allan Probin
The HT380 is a relatively new product from SIM2 and has the new Unishape lamp technology and 'BrilliantColor' colour wheel+software. I wonder if the HT3000 that was brought along was the 3000-E version - i.e. the latest version of the 3000 fitted with the Unishape and BrilliantColor mods.
Did you see any rainbows with either of these projectors? The BrilliantColor wheel has segments for RGB plus the secondary colours, unlike conventional colour wheels which are RGBRGB. The advantage of the BrilliantColor wheel is that it can produce a more natural colour palette whereas the advantage of the conventional colour wheel is that the colours used to create the image appear at twice the frequency and therefore less susceptible to visible colour separation. If you saw no rainbows looks like you are good to go!
I'm hearing reports that the latest SIM2's have incredibly good inbuilt video processing. Apparently they use a Pixelworks chip but the software has been replaced with propriatary software written by SIM2 themselves, tailored for each model based on that models characteristics. From the reports I've seen, the internal video processing has been compared with $6,000 Lumagen and Crystallio VP's and they've been found not to be any better, in fact having them in the video chain can actually degrade the image. There are owners of the $50k HT5000 projector who would undoubtedly be using a video processor in their systems if it was capable of making an improvement but they choose not to for the reasons stated. Think of it as a $6k discount!
Posted on: 05 December 2007 by tonym
For some reason I'm pretty immune to the "rainbow" effect, but chatting to my friendly dealer he thought this was quite obvious with the 3000. Surprisingly he's more or less talked me out of the 3000 (which incidentally was the older version) & suggested I should try the 380 again on an extended home demo.
I must admit I was pretty swayed by the relative brightness of the 3000 over the 380. So was SWMBO. I guess it's a bit like hi-Fi; sometimes something will grab the attention, but after a while becomes a bit tiresome.
Latest plan - try the 380 again, but maybe hold fire on a decision until I've done a similar exercise with the "new" 3000. Decisions, decisions...
It will be interesting to do the comparison of on-board processing vs. Lumagen. The complication here is by selecting only the "576i" option on the Lumagen's EDID function my Sky HD box will only output in this resolution, leaving the Lumagen to do the scaling/deinterlacing. A much better picture results, the Lumagen being miles better than the Sky box in this regard. Perhaps it'll be DVD direct, Sky HD via Lumagen.
Posted on: 05 December 2007 by Signals UK
quote:
It will be interesting to do the comparison of on-board processing vs. Lumagen. The complication here is by selecting only the "576i" option on the Lumagen's EDID function my Sky HD box will only output in this resolution, leaving the Lumagen to do the scaling/deinterlacing. A much better picture results, the Lumagen being miles better than the Sky box in this regard. Perhaps it'll be DVD direct, Sky HD via Lumagen.
Hi Tony, does this mean you are back now?
Can the Sky box not output at the going rate? IE 576 programmes at 576, 720 @ 720 and . . well, you know.
If it can (and I thought they did), then the D380 would take everything up to the 1080 level internally. Using an n-Vi @ 576 with the D380 has been rather impressive. The internal scaling is certainly not the weakness that it often is.
And as for :
quote:
For some reason I'm pretty immune to the "rainbow" effect, but chatting to my friendly dealer he thought this was quite obvious with the 3000. Surprisingly he's more or less talked me out of the 3000 (which incidentally was the older version) & suggested I should try the 380 again on an extended home demo.
Well . . . I personally thought that the rainbow effects outweighed the brightness. A new spec 3000 should combine the qualities of course!
We are burning in a new D380 as we speak, by the way.
Alastair
Posted on: 05 December 2007 by Allan Probin
Well, my new projector has arrived. It's a SIM2 Domino D80. This is a 1080p DLP machine - I decided in the end to stick with DLP again and go with a SIM2 projector this time. In a similar way that Naim have a distinctive approach to bringing out what they believe are the important elements in music reproduction, SIM2 have their particular approach to what makes a good cinematic image. SIM2 projectors may not have the highest on/off contrast ratio figures in their class but they trade this with natural colour reproduction, a clarity in the image that comes from high grade optics and an extremely high simultaneous contrast ratio - i.e. the contrast ratio within a given image.
The D80's fan noise is louder than the Optoma's; so I failed to achieve that target. The on/off contrast ratio is probably only 50% greater than the Optoma's; so I failed on that score as well - although simultaneous contrast is much higher, probably about 50% higher - so I'm claiming 'overall' contrast ratio improvements to be what I hoped for. It wasn't cheaper than my previous projector either so thats another failed target.
However, it's throwing a pretty impressive looking image. Bright scenes don't show a huge improvement - resolution/detail 'appear' the same but close observation shows that textures are better defined. Leather looks more like real leather, wool seems more fibrous and so on. The improved clarity in the image is there as well, as if the lens was a little hazy previously.
The big improvements though are in mid to dark scenes which look very detailed and three dimensional. It jumps out as I'm not used to getting so much detail and depth in dark scenes, it keeps the image quite natural looking and doesn't intrude the way a flat, grainy and 'digital' looking image can. The other big area of improvement here is the very smooth, solid, stable looking colours which previously could look rather grainy and noisy unless a scene is brightly lit.
The only criticism of the image at this point is that the projector could benefit from a professional ISF calibration. After playing around with the user-defined colour temp I've managed a good compromise between bright and dark areas. Peak whites are a little blue/green and dark areas a little warm. When the bulb has stabilised after 100hrs or so I might as well get it spot on with a proper calibration using the service menu controls. I might even invest in the colourimetry tools and have a go myself!
Posted on: 06 December 2007 by tonym
quote:
Originally posted by Signals UK:
quote:
It will be interesting to do the comparison of on-board processing vs. Lumagen. The complication here is by selecting only the "576i" option on the Lumagen's EDID function my Sky HD box will only output in this resolution, leaving the Lumagen to do the scaling/deinterlacing. A much better picture results, the Lumagen being miles better than the Sky box in this regard. Perhaps it'll be DVD direct, Sky HD via Lumagen.
Can the Sky box not output at the going rate? IE 576 programmes at 576, 720 @ 720 and . . well, you know.
Alastair
Sorry, I was a bit unclear. The idea is to stop the Sky box from de-interlacing 576i content. The Lumagen's set to accept 576i (but not P), 720P and 1080i.
Posted on: 07 December 2007 by J.N.
Hi Allan,
How goes it on the 2 channel audio front? I think we both now have SL2s?
Do you still come this way? It would be good to see you again. I could introduce you to Tony if you have the time.
My e-mail address is in my profile if you need it.
Best wishes.
John.
Posted on: 07 December 2007 by Allan Probin
A colourimeter has arrived! May have a play with that this weekend if there's time, otherwise something to look forward to over the Christmas holidays
. I think I'll have a practice on the PC monitor's and TV first though.
Hi John, quite a few changes on the 2-channel front in the last 12 months (see profile) as explained earlier in the thread. I do get to Norwich occasionally so I will definitely contact you next time I'm around.
Posted on: 07 December 2007 by tonym
I'd be very interested in how you get on with the colourimeter Alan.
If you're visiting J.N. I'll pop up & meet you if that's OK!
Posted on: 07 December 2007 by J.N.
Thanks Stuart.
Allan - Stuart told me when I met him a couple of weeks ago, that you'd 'gone Linn' - and I'd forgotten.
You and Tony would have much to discuss.
Have a good Christmas.
John.
Posted on: 22 December 2007 by tonym
Thanks to the kind efforts of the chaps at "Signals" I'm now watching a SIM2 HT3000E!
Andy spent a happy couple of hours installing brackets etc. Unfortunately it's a rather bigger beast than my old "300" model, so required quite a bit of fettling to put it up. Plus it's a fair bit heavier!
The picture quality is just breathtaking. More of everything I guess - brightness, contrast, black levels.
Many thanks to "Signals" and Chris at SIM2 for making this happen before Christmas. Now, is there anything decent to watch...
