mk, but a 67-inch plasma didn’t exist in 2008. At least, not at a consumer price.
Repo, the dark room requirement for a projector is a no-go for me. We’re often doing other things in the media room while the TV’s on… And it seems to me that projector (dark room) and Kinect (well-lit room) wouldn’t play nice together.
Well, our projector works OK with the lights up, just not as spectacularly. But it’s certainly fine for Kinect. (Kinect can actually work in near-darkness due to the IR – check out this rave-dancing action.)
Our downstairs rec room’s south-facing front windows are small and up high, so easy to cover with sun shades when we’re watching something in the afternoon. But then again, it’s been so long since we owned an internally luminescent display that I may be underselling how nice it would be to have one. (We also like that the kids can’t reach the projector, so it is only on when we say so…)
Isn’t DLP an old tech at this point?
We have a bunch of DLP projectors at work, and they drive me nuts. If I turn my head while the projector is in my field of view, I get rainbows.
One of the big gripes I remember hearing about DLP tvs at the time was their weight, and how expensive they were to service. I always thought the tech was pretty neat.
Weight? While my DLP TV is pretty large housing a 56" screen two people can easily pick it up. A plasma doesn’t way much more than it and its a flatscreen. 109lbs vs 133 and mine was one of the last bulky, heavier DLP TVs they made. Honestly I find them easier to carry than a plasma just because of how the weight is distributed.
Compare that to my old Sony 36" CRT that’s almost impossible to move at 240lb+.
I can see rainbows, but only if I really try. Still not going to buy another DLP though, absolute plasma convert these days and my DLP just died a couple weeks ago. Replaced the color wheel twice now and I am tired of it - time for the junkyard.
I’ve got a ~120lb 43" 4:3 DLP that’s from the early 2000s. It’s extremely top heavy, owing to the fact that the speakers are situated underneath the screen, with an additional “stand” section under that. Given their propensity for throwing the lamp through the screen if tilted too quickly forward, and its slight forward lean in weight, moving this thing feels constantly fraught with peril.
The plastic on the bottom stand section is extremely malleable and is already cracking, so you typically sort of have to dig your fingers into the thin line between screen-section and speaker-section. Given its incredible weight and height, yeah. . .
. . . and now the color’s gone horribly out of alignment, apparently due to failed convergence chips. I could pick up a complete repair kit, learn to solder, and repair it myself if given $150 and several extremely stressful hours of free time. . . or I could accept the fact that maybe DLP isn’t perfect, either, and move on to a more expensive set.
It will be hella weird to buy a TV that’s technically of comparable size and lose the vertical height. On the other hand, to get the ~25.5" vertical inches I’ve got now, I’d need to buy a 52" 16:9 set, and I am pretty positive that’s way out of my lower middle class income. Maybe I’ll just stick with all the blue being shifted several inches to the left and all the red being shifted several inches to the right :)
Armando, are you sure that’s a DLP? Because that kind of convergence issue is usually something you see where there are three light sources, and most DLPs only have one. Maybe they made a three-chip DLP back in the day?
As far as weight goes, my 61" DLP was lighter than my 57" plasma. It’s bigger, sure, but it’s all air inside.
No, totally, there was definitely a period of time when a DLP was the thing to get.
DLPs are not at all heavy. They weigh about the same as a similarly-sized LED set, and considerably less than a similarly-sized plasma. They look like they should weigh more, but you have to remember that it’s just a big, mostly empty plastic box.
I have no idea how expensive they are to service, because it’s ridiculously easy to service them yourself. Replacing the lamp (which we had to do after five years) was as simple as replacing a light bulb. Which is basically what you are doing. I also replaced the color wheel in our set (we had one of the early models in which the bearing on the color wheel had a tendency to go bad). That was a little more involved, but not actually difficult.
On the one hand, plasmas lack the cost of lamp replacement. So there’s that. On the other hand, they do lose brightness over time, just like DLPs, and the only remedy is to throw out the TV and buy a new one. In any event, the retail price on DLPs is so much lower, I suspect that the overall cost over X years still works out to be less, even when you account for maintenance.
It is entirely possible that I have been seeing DLP and thinking rear projection for the entirety of this thread. Please disregard anything I have said :D
Just to blow your mind: non-projector DLPs are rear projection. Those are the kind I am talking about (i.e. what I have). Still, definitely not at all heavy.
If your CRT rear projector needs alignment, it may be easy to do, btw. A lot of them have easily-accessed screws to turn.
Wow, consider me corrected! I never actually owned a DLP set - it’s amazing the misconceptions you can get second hand. Maybe I’m just scarred from my old 27" Trinitron - it was a great TV, but it was like 90 pounds or so.
Most of my rainbow-viewing was from work projectors, but they colored my perceptions enough that I’ve never considered them for home use.