Been a little busy, and I don't *think* I already replied, so thank you for that link, which I'll now investigate. I'm not much good at C, but did once write a little program to print out the declining balances in a savings account given fixed withdrawals. Something one would do with a free spreadsheet nowadays.
So maybe I'm not faint hearted (or maybe I should be).
Or in my case, don't get what I can't afford to pay for :-(
But I just picked up a cheap Benq projector on Ebay so until the lamp burns out I'll have something to play with.
However the idea of spending about 100-200 per year on electricity, and the same again for bulb replacement, worries me.
Eventually the purchase price of LED units may become affordable. I hope.
There are dire warnings about ignoring end-of-bulb-life warnings. Is that likely to be mostly marketing talk? Can replacement bulbs be fitted to lamp assemblies? (I remember all manner of guff about inkjet and laser refills.)
Every time I look the previously just-out-of-feasible LED price has dropped another notch or two, so by the time I get around to it, it will probably be 50W (although, forced cooling of that will be problematic). I might just stick to 30W, as it's dead cheap now, the optics are cheap and easy and cooling isn't so much of an issue. Not much point spending too much dosh on a test set-up and it failing because of cramped space. It's an old Mitsubishi LVP SA51U, which I've stripped the lamp driver board out of and already used a 150W HID lamp in an external light tunnel for - that worked, but was too dim. Picture quality was ok, though.
A PC will significantly add to the faff of using it as a TV, though limitin g the number of applications that play video will help, as will a decent re mote control. However, a PC will slaughter a TV in one area that is importa nt for me: upscaling. SD broadcast TV upscaled to HD looks awful on a TV. T he image is distractingly fake and even after a few months with my new TV, I still hate the image quality.
I'm afraid that anything that is quiet enough not to be distracting and bri ght enough not to need black-out curtains rather than regular curtains is g oing to be around £1500. However, for this you can easily get an image ar ound 7-8 *feet*. A TV that size would hurt.
Really? They cost around £250 and on Eco mode should last twice that. And do you really watch that much TV? maybe you do, but I've had two projector s (deliberate upgrade rather than failure) and four bulbs in my 15 years.
Small? Well, as long as you have a large wall for two-metre-o-vision :-)
Bugger the screen nonsense. I've always projected onto a wall and viewed fr om around 8 feet away. I tried a screen and neither I nor my wife could tel l the difference, so I suggest you compare for yourself and see if you care about the differences you see. There is a lot of snake oil in home cinema (beware people selling nonsense like Oxygen-free HDMI cables).
All in all, I really hate my TV and can't wait until I can afford to instal l an ascending screen in the floor (I no longer have a wall I can project o n to and the ceilings are too high for a regular screen to hang from).
Looks like one of the new COB type (as in chip on board, not corn on the cob type) there's a chap called Julian Ilet on u-tube who tinkers with them ... he also tried welding with solar panels!
Only just saw this post. Rule of thumb - by the time the light gets through the guts of the projector and onto the screen it's about 1/10th of what you start with.
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