Lamens Lab? What is that?
If you take a piece of paper, punch a small hole, and throw a light through it, you have a projector. That is the basic principle. But, with real life projectors, the heart is something called a DLP chip invented by Dr. Larry Hornbeck in 1987. In essence a light switch, the DLP switch has 2 million tiny mirrors that move on hinges. These mirrors project a light source either towards the screen or away from it giving you tiny pixels on the screen that form the image. The DLP switch can work with 1024 shades of grey and about 17 million color combinations. When you talk about a 3 chip projector, you are talking about some 35 trillion colors!
Controlling these mirrors needs a computing power far larger and faster than what you have on a standard PC.
So when you come and tell us that you have made a DIY projector, should we not take it with a pinch of salt? Unless you come with some solid proof that you really have something working in terms of photographs, I am afraid no one is going to believe you. And the photos have to be authenticated somehow as being yours.
We look forward to seeing your projector.
Cheers
@Venkat, I really have to disagree with you. Have you ever seen a DIY projector based on a single LCD?
I had made one sometime back using a 15" Benq 1280x720p (native) monitor HD projector and the total cost came to only around <16K and watching HD content was really good, it was comparable to the branded products (apart from some minor issues) with a fraction of the cost. Lot of people had made decent PJs out of Full HD panels also, since it was not available in India (within reasonable size), i had to settle for 720p.
Its not a rocket science. I had bought the Fresnel lenses and Triplet from Lumen Lab. Bulbs (MH from Osram 400w) and ballast locally. Since size is one of the limitations of DIY PJ (in Living room), I had to settle for a readymade PJ with 5" LCD which supports 720p (native) which I bought from canada for 13K INR along with 2 bullbs. The size and shape is same as commercial PJs. PQ and brightness was better when I was using the 15" because of the tight dot pitch than the 5". Anyways the PJ is giving acceptable PQ for HD on projecting to 100". Brightness is slightly lesser since it is using a 150w MH ceramic bulb, probably I may tweak it with my previous bulb.
Advantages of DIY PJ:
- Big screen at a fraction of the cost of commercial PJs
- Bulb life is around 10000 hrs (min 6000-8000hrs)
- Replacing a bulb will cost very less (~2000/- for my current PJ. I may not require as it came with another bulb as a freebie). My previous Osram bulb costed only 750/- with same life time, but it was not compact as the ceramic bulbs.
Disadvantages:
- Lot of tweaking required to get the desired PQ
- Size will be very big (based on the lcd panel)
- Very difficult to make it silent as other PJs
Edit : I am planning to put my Lumen Lab Fresnels (split / 2Nos / .5mm) and Triplet for sale, I will start a new thread for that.
hyeah:
