Dead Pixel Check

[roball35]

I'm thinking of buying a projector soon to take advantage of Sky hd when it's finally introduced. I'm currently leaning towards the Hitachi TX200 and have seen some really competetive prices on the net. But I'm concerned that no retailer seems to be advertising pixel checks and was wondering how important these are.

Also how common are dead pixels? I don't want to save £200 just to end up with a projector I'm unhappy with. How noticeable are they and do retailers, even if the pixel check isn't advertised, offer the service for a fee? It's something I wouldn't mind paying for.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[KraGorn]

DPCs are somewhat controversial .. at least one large AV Forums sponsor doesn't offer them and claims they're pretty much worthless since dead pixels can evolve over the first few months of life.

I prefer to deal with someone offering such a check but wouldn't refuse to buy in the absence of one if the price was significantly less than somewhere offerng one.

[roball35]

Thanks for your advice. I'm tempted to take a risk and save some money.

[throwit]

what you do is get a piece of card about a5 sized, and hold it about six inches from the lens with a black image being projected, refocus the projector...if you see small bright patches of grids or lines that are brighter than the rest of the image, you may have dead pixels - never had the opportunity to try this on a dlp, but i know it works for lcd

call me a plum but i don't have a clue about how to get my jpeg example of dead lcd pixel from my laptop to your eyes...tell me how and i'll show you !

[Anim]

But I'm concerned that no retailer seems to be advertising pixel checks

Both DiscountTV and Ivojo offer pixel checks.

Anim

[throwit]

i'm so stupid ! - i just spotted the attach menu, so here's a picture of dead lcd pixels and also, something weird that came out of the same sp5000 on one occasion