Its 16:9 and the native resolution is 1280*720. Like an lcd monitor, you get the best quality at the native rez, but it will scale up/down any other resolutions. You'll get the black bars with 4:3 and 2.35:1, but it can be zoomed or stretched if you prefer, either by the pc or the projector. Pixels are pretty damn sharp. Certainly a lot better than you would think. College and school setups aren't a good comparison, as all the ones I have seen tend to look blurry, and have the image hanging off the screen or not filling it, while the gentle breeze blows the pull-down screen around. I think this relates to slack-ass setup regarding focus and screen/projector positioning by the owners.
Some of the reasons I chose a fixed screen. No wind rippling problems, no curling, and image is always positioned exactly right
You really need to look at a home theater projector, not a presentation projector. There's big differences between them. You also need to see them set up properly in the right viewing environment, which does not mean a display model sitting on a few boxes in a brightly lit store pointing at the not-so-white wall. The best description I can think of is that it's like a large LCD monitor with regards to clarity. It did take a few hours of setting up to get the image to that kind of quality as the menus are fairly daunting. It's worthwhile spending this time to calibrate everything though, as it makes a big difference. I tried to take some photo's up close to the screen, but they always turn out heaps blurrier than they should be.
You can have a little light coming in the room as long as it doesn't hit the screen, but if you have too much then the black levels will suffer. I also found that the light from the projector goes through the screen, hits the wall, and reflects back onto the screen from behind. This was also causing the light to leak from around the outside of the black frame as it doesn't sit completely flush with the wall. So, I used a piece of black satin and cut/taped that to the back of the screen. This gives darker black levels, plus the light leaking around the frame was annoying. It made the screen look like it was possessed/holy, like it had just gained a level or something. lol.
I did a bit of looking around at various models around $2000, and the Sanyo PLV-Z5 pretty much offers the best bang for buck. The screen was $600. You'll want a decent length lead running from the projector to the pc as well so you have flexibility with the placement, so that can cost around $100 in itself too. This is all in Australian dollars. Lamps are around $500, and they last around 3000 hours given a clean and cool environment and regular filter cleaning. The fans in it were temperature controlled, but I set them to go at max speed all the time, as the heat is the worst enemy of the lamp. Also, by switching to lamp economy mode the life is increased also. If I need more punch in the image, then there's plenty of room for increasing brightness/contrast. The projector has a 3 year warranty, the screen 10 years, the lamp 90 days. Apparently the lamps tend to blow within the first hundred hours if they're defective, so I'm putting a few hours on it before the 90 days is up.
The next step up is a 1080p which does native 1920*1080, and costs around $3000.
Yes it is slightly annoying about needing the room dark, but I have pull-down blinds here. The lamp takes less than 1 minute to come to full brightness from power on, NOT 5 minutes like the convenient exaggeration made previously. In that time I can pull the blinds, so it doesn't really bother me to spend this small time when I'd be watching a movie for an hour and a half or more. At the end of it, it takes less than a minute for the blinds to be up again.
The keyboard and mouse are temporary. This is for movies, not TV, or programming or anything else. Maybe play a video game every now and then, but I rarely ever do that any more. One of the remote controls on the table is for the pc.
Some of the reasons I chose a fixed screen. No wind rippling problems, no curling, and image is always positioned exactly right
You really need to look at a home theater projector, not a presentation projector. There's big differences between them. You also need to see them set up properly in the right viewing environment, which does not mean a display model sitting on a few boxes in a brightly lit store pointing at the not-so-white wall. The best description I can think of is that it's like a large LCD monitor with regards to clarity. It did take a few hours of setting up to get the image to that kind of quality as the menus are fairly daunting. It's worthwhile spending this time to calibrate everything though, as it makes a big difference. I tried to take some photo's up close to the screen, but they always turn out heaps blurrier than they should be.
You can have a little light coming in the room as long as it doesn't hit the screen, but if you have too much then the black levels will suffer. I also found that the light from the projector goes through the screen, hits the wall, and reflects back onto the screen from behind. This was also causing the light to leak from around the outside of the black frame as it doesn't sit completely flush with the wall. So, I used a piece of black satin and cut/taped that to the back of the screen. This gives darker black levels, plus the light leaking around the frame was annoying. It made the screen look like it was possessed/holy, like it had just gained a level or something. lol.
I did a bit of looking around at various models around $2000, and the Sanyo PLV-Z5 pretty much offers the best bang for buck. The screen was $600. You'll want a decent length lead running from the projector to the pc as well so you have flexibility with the placement, so that can cost around $100 in itself too. This is all in Australian dollars. Lamps are around $500, and they last around 3000 hours given a clean and cool environment and regular filter cleaning. The fans in it were temperature controlled, but I set them to go at max speed all the time, as the heat is the worst enemy of the lamp. Also, by switching to lamp economy mode the life is increased also. If I need more punch in the image, then there's plenty of room for increasing brightness/contrast. The projector has a 3 year warranty, the screen 10 years, the lamp 90 days. Apparently the lamps tend to blow within the first hundred hours if they're defective, so I'm putting a few hours on it before the 90 days is up.
The next step up is a 1080p which does native 1920*1080, and costs around $3000.
Yes it is slightly annoying about needing the room dark, but I have pull-down blinds here. The lamp takes less than 1 minute to come to full brightness from power on, NOT 5 minutes like the convenient exaggeration made previously. In that time I can pull the blinds, so it doesn't really bother me to spend this small time when I'd be watching a movie for an hour and a half or more. At the end of it, it takes less than a minute for the blinds to be up again.
The keyboard and mouse are temporary. This is for movies, not TV, or programming or anything else. Maybe play a video game every now and then, but I rarely ever do that any more. One of the remote controls on the table is for the pc.
Also, I have a usb hub, keyboard, mouse and small monitor running from the same computer into a seperate room where "normal" computing can be done.