Question Buying advice. First projector. Preowend 'enthusiast' or new.

Gunnerzz

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Holy crap this is harder than buying a car! I'm sure this comes up all the time...

My set up so far is as follows:

Onkyo NR555
Chromecast W/GTV
Sapphire 92" white screen (To be purchased)

Room:
Throw distance 3-4.5m
White everything...
Can be light controlled but somewhat reduced daylight viewing would be nice for the kids.


So most of my media is stored on a HTPC. A lot being 4K with ATMOS soundtracks.

There's no way I can afford a decent 4k unit, even pixel shift is a stretch, so I've been looking at the higher end 1080p projectors.

So it's come down to the following:

Optoma HD29he
or
JVC X35
Sony HW50ES

They're all hitting around the £600 mark. The Optoma is brighter and can supposedly accept and downsample 4k media, but I imagine has worse contrast and blacks the other two.

Any input would be highly appreciated.
 
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So most of my media is stored on a HTPC. A lot being 4K with ATMOS soundtracks.

Do you have a player than can rescale the image to 1080p and tone map the REC2020 HDR to Rec 709?

Optoma HD29he
or
JVC 35X
Sony HW50ES


Have you ever viewed any of these.

Do you know if the rainbow effect bothers you with DLP?
 
I managed to view a couple of similar Optoma units at Richer sounds last year before covid but it's hard now. I don't seem to see the rainbows.

I only have what's listed above. What player device are you referring to, something like an HDFury?
 
I only have what's listed above. What player device are you referring to, something like an HDFury?


No I mean literally what plays the 4k files.

I used to use a Vero 4k Kodi player with a 1080p projector.

It could downscale 4k files to 1080p fine and it did tone map but the colour always looked off the to point I found it far better to just watch 1080p files that where in the correct colour space.

I don't seem to see the rainbows.

Well that sounds like it gives you the option of DLP's

I'm personally not a fan of them but given you have an all white room and don't have the budget for a ambient light rejecting screen your not going to have good contrast levels anyway.
 
No I mean literally what plays the 4k files.

I used to use a Vero 4k Kodi player with a 1080p projector.

It could downscale 4k files to 1080p fine and it did tone map but the colour always looked off the to point I found it far better to just watch 1080p files that were in the correct colour space.

Oh I see.

I use Emby hosted on my PC. I play through my 4K Samsung TV app atm and thing seem fine, but I'm no video connoisseur... I'm not using the premium version so I'm pretty sure it doesn't actively downscale. My plan was to keep the same system and use either the new Chromecast or Nvidia shield TV.
 
I use Emby hosted on my PC. I play through my 4K Samsung TV app atm and thing seem fine,


Yeah, a 4k TV will display a 4k image correctly with REC2020 and probably HDR

For a 1080p projector to display the image the player will have to downscale the image and tone map the colors to fit REC709.

You can get some players that do this better than others, but by and large your better off just watching 1080p files on most 1080p projectors.


Second hand Optoman UHD40's might be worth adding to your list to consider second hand - they're Faux 4k pixel shifting DLP, but much higher resolution than 1080p if 4k is important to you.
 
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Second hand Optoman UHD40's might be worth adding to your list to consider second hand - they're Faux 4k pixel shifting DLP, but much higher resolution than 1080p if 4k is important to you.

They're around £900 still which isn't affordable for me, unfortunately.

I've had an offer of a JVC DLA-X35 for £550 which I think is pretty decent. If I can get it for that, then the Shield TV becomes an option which now supports tone mapping.

4K isn't so important at my viewing distance. Will be about 3m from a 92" screen.
 
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Holy crap this is harder than buying a car! I'm sure this comes up all the time...

My set up so far is as follows:

Onkyo NR555
Chromecast W/GTV
Sapphire 92" white screen (To be purchased)

Room:
Throw distance 3-4.5m
White everything...
Can be light controlled but somewhat reduced daylight viewing would be nice for the kids.


So most of my media is stored on a HTPC. A lot being 4K with ATMOS soundtracks.

There's no way I can afford a decent 4k unit, even pixel shift is a stretch, so I've been looking at the higher end 1080p projectors.

So it's come down to the following:

Optoma HD29he
or
JVC 35X
Sony HW50ES

They're all hitting around the £600 mark. The Optoma is brighter and can supposedly accept and downsample 4k media, but I imagine has worse contrast and blacks the other two.

Any input would be highly appreciated.

Sorry for not answering your question on which projector at the moment because the big issue I see is that a white room and wanting casual daytime viewing will really need an ALR screen to help handle both the room conditions and casual viewing. The bigger problem though is the price because one of these screen will be more than your projector sum unless you get lucky with a second hand one.

On the plus side though the screen will outlast several projectors so what you fork out now you shouldn’t need to do again unless you want to increase its size.
 
Sorry for not answering your question on which projector at the moment because the big issue I see is that a white room and wanting casual daytime viewing will really need an ALR screen to help handle both the room conditions and casual viewing. The bigger problem though is the price because one of these screen will be more than your projector sum unless you get lucky with a second hand one.

On the plus side though the screen will outlast several projectors so what you fork out now you shouldn’t need to do again unless you want to increase its size.

Thanks for the input. I do understand the limitations. The plan is that it will generally be used for film nights so viewing the dark. There may be the odd occasion where it could be used where the kids might not want to sit in total darkness, they're only little. But we still have a TV soo...
 

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