[apocklington]

Hi all, went for a demo of the Philips Monroe in John Lewis at Bluewater Essex this morning. Not A very successful demo, firstly I asked if the lights could be switched off in the demo room, but was told by the assistant that this was not possible, secondly I asked to see a dvd played, unfortunately they had lost the remote for the dvd play so I could only see the contents page of their demo dvd. With all this aside I was still impressed with this PJ, I could not detect any screen door, the fan noise was almost non existent, the picture was pin sharp with no evidence of noise and from what I saw of it the colours were quite natural looking. I am unable to comment on the black level due to the lighting conditions although I did notice that the brightness and contrast levels were set quite high and the picture was still acceptable. I had a look at the Sony HS1 while I was there, but I was not impressed at all with it, even my kids noticed the difference. They are both priced at £1995 (not the kids the PJ's) they do offer a price promise against other shops but not internet shops. They said it would be 2-3 weeks for them to get one for me. On the plus side they will allow you to check for dead pixels before you part with your hard earned cash. I am going to shop round to find the best price, does any one know of any other shops that sell this PJ. Thanks

[michaelab]

Unfortunately the big stores like John Lewis haven't really grasped the PJ market properly yet. I went to Peter Jones in Sloane Square (London), which is part of the John Lewis partnership, on Saturday and saw a demo of the Sony VPL-CS4 (price £1700) which was also very unsatisfactory.

The room was dark enough and I could watch a DVD (Toy Story) but the image was being projected onto a dark blue wall!! The sales assistant knew absolutely nothing about the PJ (not even which model it was!) and got in a strop with me because I played around with the zoom and focus a little: "..DON'T TOUCH it, they spent ages setting it all up". Whoever 'they' were clearly didn't know what they were doing because any knowledgeable person wouldn't have allowed a PJ to be demoed against a dark blue wall and also would have bothered to do the keystone adjustment (which hadn't been done).

Having said all that though I was very impressed with the image quality, and could compare it to the same output also being shown on a 40" Sony plasma screen beside it. No screen door effect and overall excellent image. I obviously couldn't make a good judgement about colour but taking into account the dark blue background it looked very good.

I didn't ask why they chose to demo a CS4 and not a CS1 or other more "Home Cinema" oriented PJ as the sales assistant clearly wouldn't have had a clue.

Michael.