Projector Reviews: An Introduction
Projector Reviews: An Introduction
Projection television has taken home entertainment to new limits. No longer is your viewing pleasure controlled by the physical constrictions imposed by a regular television set. When you have a front projector system the wall of your TV room becomes your television screen. You can watch movies much the same as you would if you were in the auditorium of a cinema. Try watching in complete darkness to get the best effect. Although there are some projector models that rely on a tuner and audio amplifier they are rare. To watch television casually you can use the tuner in your VCR for the video portion and your AV amplifier to get the sound.
There are two different types of video projectors: tubed and LCP (liquid crystal projection). Both have distinctive rewards that affect installation and presentation. The tubed projector is a box that has three lenses. Each of the lenses focus individual red, green and blue imagery on to the screen to create a TV likeness that is as large as you want. This type of projector is most commonly used in theaters. With a tubed projector there’s more to the optics than you can see. Because each of the lenses is on a different bloc the pictures don’t naturally have common characteristics. The picture is converged electronically at which time a pattern generator creates a network that has to be focused and united so the squares are in tune and in line. This same process is then repeated for all three of the color tubes. If you don’t have a lot of experience it may take many hours for you to align the tubes. Because of this complication tubed projectors are usually installed by experts and then left alone. The lenses of a tubed projector are wide angle so that they can provide large pictures close to the screen, usually a 60-inch picture at 2.5m.
The LCP projector is much more user-friendly. You can move the LCP from one room to another and it requires no more set-up than a smaller slide projector. At the core of the LCP are three liquid crystal panels. A high-wattage metal halide lamp illuminates each of these panels. A complicated sequence of dichroic reflectors and filters split the white light into color rays of red, green and blue. Each of these rays light up a liquid crystal panel. The imagery from the panels unites at the central point of one lens. Zoom and focus are supplied. Many LCD models are controlled with an IR handset. The disadvantage of the LCP projector is its chicken wire effect: overlays upon the image are a jumbled network of pixels or picture elements.