Man, look at that nice hair
by Anonymous at 7/12/2004 03:16:00 PM
Hi All,
For those who might be interested, the next generation of Home theater projectors is out. And, following moore's Law they are now down to around $2000, and have twice the performance of mine. You can now see the Kerry/Bush race in all of its folical glory!
Bulbs are still a bit pricy at $375 for 2000 hours, but how else are you going to own a portable 6lbs, 110in 16:9 HDTV? At 19 cents an hour to operate you can watch 50 movies to the cost of watching one in the Theater, with the added benefits of being able to pause the film, relax on the couch, and not have to restrain yourself from beating in the head of some guy who thinks he IS at home on the couch and talking.
Since a person with 20/20 vision needs to be less than 3 times the picture height away from a screen to see 720p hi-def pictures, Projection is still the only way to go unless you have a small living room. (which is why the plasma displays that cost twice as much are always right on the isle at best buy)
Steve Smallcombe is a web-friend of mine, and knows his stuff. Here is a review of one of the leading new projectors written by him.
hook up a Myth-TV (linux based) and a Sony lifestyle speaker system and you have a small, easily hidden solution/alternative to a big screen.
(Of course you can also get the automatic screen and drop/lift for the projector, but add on another $4000 to the cost)
Cool Stuff.
For those who might be interested, the next generation of Home theater projectors is out. And, following moore's Law they are now down to around $2000, and have twice the performance of mine. You can now see the Kerry/Bush race in all of its folical glory!
Bulbs are still a bit pricy at $375 for 2000 hours, but how else are you going to own a portable 6lbs, 110in 16:9 HDTV? At 19 cents an hour to operate you can watch 50 movies to the cost of watching one in the Theater, with the added benefits of being able to pause the film, relax on the couch, and not have to restrain yourself from beating in the head of some guy who thinks he IS at home on the couch and talking.
Since a person with 20/20 vision needs to be less than 3 times the picture height away from a screen to see 720p hi-def pictures, Projection is still the only way to go unless you have a small living room. (which is why the plasma displays that cost twice as much are always right on the isle at best buy)
Steve Smallcombe is a web-friend of mine, and knows his stuff. Here is a review of one of the leading new projectors written by him.
hook up a Myth-TV (linux based) and a Sony lifestyle speaker system and you have a small, easily hidden solution/alternative to a big screen.
(Of course you can also get the automatic screen and drop/lift for the projector, but add on another $4000 to the cost)
Cool Stuff.
"a person with 20/20 vision needs to be less than 3 times the picture height away from a screen to see 720p hi-def pictures"
Can you explain that? I'm guessing that this means the minimum arc resolution of the eye corresponds to a spot larger than a 720p pixel at such a distance. But I'm probably way off.
My naive thought is that you'd get better picture quality if the pixel size is smaller than the eye resolution. I suppose I don't see how larger pixels (that is, eye closer to image or bigger image) helps.
My uncorrected vision is 20/200. How close do I need to be to the TV? We might need to install an IMAX in our family room so I can see the picture from the couch.
Thinking it over, I guess the idea is that if you are too far from the screen, the spot resolution of the eye is back down to analog TV resolution (or less) so having HDTV is pointless.
Maybe you need the spot resolution of the eye to be greater than analog TV (to take advantage of HDTV) and less than the HDTV resolution (to avoid pixelation), which would bracket the TV size and viewing distance.
I still can't find a discussion of this on the internet. But I did find this interesting link on 20/20 vision and the arc resolution of human vision.
I think this blogger comments thing might be broken. It passes hyperlinks through the blogger site so that the linked page's Google page rank doesn't increase. I guess the idea is to discourage search-engine-optimizer spammers.
Anyway, the URL is: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/raylei.html#c2
Hyperphysics is a cool site but it uses frames, so if that URL doesn't work, try:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html
then navigate Light & Vision -> Vision -> 20/20. Good luck.
The page says the resolution for most people is 5e-4 radians, which is (pause while I find calculator) 2.9e-2 degrees.
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