[Klippie]

Hi all,

I visited the Scottish HiFi And HomeCinema show yesterday and just thought I would post a few thoughts on the projectors and associated equipment I saw.

Infocus Screenplay 5700 & Lexicon RT10 DVD player playing Star Wars Episode II.

The image from this PJ looked a little on the soft side for my liking but this could have been down to the focus being a little off. The image looked bright and the colours excellent, the contrast was very impressive compared to my HS10 there was more shadow detail in the darker scenes of the film. Thankfully there were no rainbows to be seen the only thing I noticed was a little distortion on fast moving objects. This put me off the PJ to be quite honest because once I had seen them I saw them all the time.

Vidikron Vision Model 40 & 9’ Stewart Firehawk Screen & unknown DVD player playing The Fast And The Furious.

The first thing that hit me was how bright this PJ was, it was almost too bright in some scenes, I don’t know if it was the brightness turned up too much or the gain from the Firehawk screen. There were also no rainbows and motion artifacts to be seen anywhere it produced a very nice colourful and sharp looking image indeed. The only down side was a lamp life of 1000 hours.

Sim2 Domino 20 & unknown DVD player playing The Lord Of The Rings.

I only saw this for about five minutes but it looked excellent, the image was bright, colours and contrast first class, again no rainbows or motion artifacts to be seen anywhere. Very nice indeed.

Sim2 HT300 XTRA same setup as above playing U571.

WOW…. This PJ is the best I have ever seen, the image was simply crystal clear the colours looked so natural and on top of that the shadow detail was amazing. I must have sat watching this for about twenty minutes and could not pick out any faults at all. I went up to the screen to check out the screen door and could not see anything till about a foot away. Downside £7000 but at that price it should be stunning and it was.

There were no LCD PJ’s at the show but they would have had to be something special to be better than those DPL’s. The 1280 X 720 pixel machines gave an exceptional image, when the time comes upgrade in a few years time the price of the hi-res DPL’s should be within my budget but who knows what will be available by then.

The Pioneer room had a JVC HDTV DVHS video recorder showing some hi-def recordings on a plasma which was quite stunning pity our tv is still in the Stone Age.

One of the demo rooms had a HCPC type machine running on a plasma display. It was from a Scottish company named AnimationAudio. It was the most impressive thing I saw at the show, it was basically a very high quality computer with a huge hard drive for storing music and films and could rip cd and dvd at various rates/quality then burn them back to disk if required. Also it had THX quality sound and a tv card for recording television programs with an EPG for the tv times. All this was controlled with a hand held wireless mouse. They told me it could be configured to any specification a customer needs. All the outputs you could wish for were there to run plasmas’s and PJ’s with component/dvi etc. They said it was going to be launched in about three weeks priced at £3500.

I quite like the idea of having all my cd’s and dvd’s available instantly at top quality and being able to select on screen via menus anything I care to listen to or watch.

Roll on next years show……

Klippie.

[taimur]

can you use the computer as a normal computer too?

Originally posted by taimur
can you use the computer as a normal computer too?

Originally posted by Klippie
They said it was going to be launched in about three weeks priced at £3500.

I wouldn't think so - can't see it being "multifunctional" given its low price

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

So you never saw the Immersive Virtuoso in the Linn room. I woke up today to an email from someone who attended the show and was v impressed with how good it looked.

I will refraini from commenting on what I thought of the other set ups. I will also refrain from commenting on the Virtuoso as Linn never played any DVD-Video in the 25 minutes I sat in their room!hahaha

I saw the PC thing as well. It had a normal windows desktop and looked like it was using WMP as the audio product. It looked just like a PC in a nice case to me.

Gordon

Gordon

[Klippie]

Taimur,

The guy who I spoke to said it had a broadband modem/connection built in, so I take it this meant it was also a computer.


Gordon,

I had a look in the Linn room there were a few people gathered round something this must have been the Immersive Virtuoso you mentioned, I did not go over for a look though.

Klippie.