When I went to my cousin’s house for christmas he had a basement with a projection TV. I think it was about 6x9ft projected, probably a bit bigger. He said it was a dell and it cost him $1500. Not bad considering the size of the screen. When I went home to look it up I saw some articles about building one out of a 15" LCD screen http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/20041113/
Has anyone built one, and was it worth it? I think i’d be better off paying someone $100-200 to build one or buying a box pre-made but if its a worthless, vague picture then why bother.
My brother told me one of his friends bought an old projector at a school sale (one where you can put a book on the projector and have it shown on the screen, not one where you have to use transparencies) for $50 and just put an LCD screen face down on that. That sounds like a nice solution but ugly to look at.
If I do get one I might just be better off waiting until I find a great deal on slickdeals or fatwallet isntead of building one (and waiting until I have some money, hurry up 2008). There was a deal on Slickdeals about a $1100 model for $480 or so after rebates and pricematches.
On another note I want to be a gigolo too. My cousin married a woman who has wealthy parents and they paid for alot of my cousin and his wives house and furnishings. Plus his wife is attractive and pretty nice, so she has that going for her too. So teach me to be a wealthy woman’s gigolo or build a projection TV, I don’t care the end result is the same for me.
You won’t get a very good projector out of that. The big problem will be brightness. There are also kits for “$20 projectors” that involve putting a fresnel lens in front of a standard TV and projecting it on the wall. The thing is, the light output remains the same, but spread over an area perhaps 10 times as large. It makes for a very dim picture.
Projectors are pretty cheap now. Look on Ebay for used ones. If you want awesome picture quality and low cost, and don’t mind tinkering, you can find used 3-gun CRT based projectors for very cheap. They are very large, heavy, and have to be calibrated on a regular basis, so universities and large organizations are dumping them on the market like crazy and replacing them with small LCD and DLP projectors. But in terms of absolute picture quality, a well-calibrated CRT projector can’t be beat. I have a friend who picked up a couple from a university auction for something like $100 each, and his picture quality beats my $2500 DLP projector, although it’s not quite as bright.
No, they’re front projection. And they aren’t very bright, so you need an absolutely dark room. But the picture can be astoundingly good. A lot of them can handle HDTV, and they apparently look gorgeous.