What next as an upgrade? Advice sought

[pcavelle]

I fairly recently set up a front room projection system with a Denon 2800 DVD & a Sim2 HT200DM, which is pretty good as a starter system. I've no major complaints about the picture at all although the projector I feel is a little noisy!

At the moment there is no possibility of a dedicated HC room, but how could I upgrade what I have?

My thoughts so far were:

1) Change of screen to something tab tensioned and 'grey-er' - either a Grayhawk or the Da Lite equivalent

2) Upgrade of exisiting component cable from Van Damme to something from Transparent Cable - will this make a difference?

3) Addition of some kind of processor - given that the projector is SVGA only I don't think I need a scaler. And given that the DVD player is PAL/NTSC progressive already I don't know if an iScan Pro will make an improvement, plus I think you have to manually switch it from PAL to NTSC. What else is there?

4) Sell remaining kidney, flog the HT200DM & buy an HT300 - greater contrast & resolution but still the same brightness. The Sim2 HT200DM is pretty dim really, not that that's a problem in the dark of course!

Any suggestions gratefully received but I don't have the room for a CRT!

Thanks - Paul

[lmccauley]

Originally posted by pcavelle

1) Change of screen to something tab tensioned and 'grey-er' - either a Grayhawk or the Da Lite equivalent

This could be a worthwhile upgrade. If you manage to get a comparative demo between a Grayhawk and normal screen I'd be interested to hear your findings.

2) Upgrade of exisiting component cable from Van Damme to something from Transparent Cable - will this make a difference?

Probably not - I believe that the professional installers just use standard cable specified for the job.

3) Addition of some kind of processor - given that the projector is SVGA only I don't think I need a scaler. And given that the DVD player is PAL/NTSC progressive already I don't know if an iScan Pro will make an improvement, plus I think you have to manually switch it from PAL to NTSC. What else is there?

This might be worthwhile. See if you can take something like a Quadscan Elite home to demo. The internal scaler of the HT200DM can definitely be improved on. Try it with the opening scene of Star Trek: Insurrection.

4) Sell remaining kidney, flog the HT200DM & buy an HT300 - greater contrast & resolution but still the same brightness. The Sim2 HT200DM is pretty dim really, not that that's a problem in the dark of course!

I prefered the HT200DM to the HT300 - but then the 300 has a much, much worse rainbow effect than the 200DM (which I barely noticed once during about 5 minutes of viewing).

Cheers,
Liam

[Jeff]

Originally posted by lmccauley


I prefered the HT200DM to the HT300 - but then the 300 has a much, much worse rainbow effect than the 200DM (which I barely noticed once during about 5 minutes of viewing).

Source material?, the HT300 should be better than the HT200DM with regard to rainbow since it has a faster colour wheel (2.5x vs 2x).

Jeff

[lmccauley]

My mistake, I should have said that the HT200DM was much better than the HT250 (not 300) for Rainbow. Source material was a NTSC DVD from an Arcam FMJ at The Event in Glasgow.

Cheers,
Liam