Short H77 review

It's eagerly awaited that's for sure! How's it going now anyway, you were quite disappointed initially, have the problems been solved or are you still thinking you'll need some sort of fix to yours? I've gotta be honest, I'm in two minds whether to get the H77 or the AE700... the AE700 is a lot cheaper, there's going to have to be quite a performance advantage with the H77 to justify the extra outlay. My H77 was reserved, no obligation if I didn't want it basically (it's not as if Ben won't be able to shift it!). I'm going to have a look when it comes in and if it blows me away (which I expect it probably will) then that will be that. It would be nice if the AE700 was available to demo at the same time for comparisons sake! I have to admit I'm worried about how my wife is going to react to the looks of the H77, she's just decorated the living room and I have to admit it looks really nice but the walls are in rich red and this is going to stand out like a sore thumb! Wonder if it's possible to paint the case (well why not?).

Cheers,
Andy.
 
Yep, all issues resolved. A new DVD player (3910) and acceptance of the fact it has zero overscan (unlike all previous pjs which had about 5% and therefore masked some of the slight image sizing broadcast issues). I am in awe of it every time I switch it on. It gives me 95% of the quality of the S3 with extra brightness, almost zero noise and money in the bank (even after buying the 3910).

Everything is rosy here and I strongly expect it will blow you away. Could never go back to LCD myself. DLP images are just so much smoother and more natural, IMHO of course :D
 
Tell me Messiah .. I'd love to use your real name if I knew it ;) .. have you seen the Domino HT300 (I think that's the Mustang model), and if so can you compare that to the H77?

I ask because that's the only Mustang projector I was interested in due to its' silence .. of course, £6000 was a bit of a hindrance. :D
 
Think his name is Neil but wasn't sure so didn't use it. Will the H77 be ok with a 72" diagonal screen or is the brightness going to be a problem with a screen that small?

Cheers,
Andy.
 
Not seen any of the current SIM range I'm afraid. First SIM I saw about 2 1/2 years ago (when I realised my trusty Sony VPL900 could be bettered :D ) was rather noisy and not that great I thought. So not looked at any since.

The H77 will be pretty bright on a 72" diagonal screen. On low lamp mode it's brighter (I reckon) than my S3 was on high lamp mode and that's on a 110" diagonal. Fantastic in low lamp mode though :smashin:

(Neil)
 
You should have no problems with a 72" diagonal screen (though have you checked the throw will work for you?).

I've watched a Toshiba MT8 which is theoretically a brighter projector at this sort of size. The H77 has much more contrast and you may even find you can watch at this size with some degree of ambient light.

I've not seen the Domino range but have owned a Sim2 previously....can't believe they've managed to tame the noise to anything like this level. Have started to notice that my dvd player allows me to hear the disk spinning...the H77 is that quiet the dvd is louder! Far from silent of course, but just not obtrusive.

You could be in trouble from your other half re. the white slab looks, but even though my wife initially wasn't keen she's been too busy looking at how good the image is to notice the projector any more (and she usually can't tell what all the fuss is about). You'll find it well worth the wait and money.

Regards,

Ian Guinan
 
ian_guinan said:
Have started to notice that my dvd player allows me to hear the disk spinning
So, the next upgrade rears its' head, a quieter DVD player. :laugh:
 
God, it was nearly 3 months ago that I placed my order :eek: .. well it finally just arrived so hopefully by the end of the weekend I'll have a big smile on my face .. as long as I don't look at the invoice. ;)
 
I saw an H77 which had been upgraded with the C14 firmware yesterday, and the posterisation is greatly reduced. It's still there on the U571 scene for example, but I found reducing the light output with a filter can make it totaly dissapear. Using the right filter is the trick though, as the nd filter we used was a bit too strong so was overkill, but at least it can be minimised or eliminated. More experimentation needed though.

The CWI was at 30 on this machine, and after some adjustment in both directions, we found that 28 was probably the best. It reduced the posterisation a tad further but still couldn't eliminate it. This is a very bright projector, and filled an 104inch wide screen with no problems on low lamp mode. Anything smaller should have plenty of light for some ambient I would think (as Ian has suggested). The lamp will dull down by about 10% IIRC within the first 100 - 200 hours, so will be less bright, but that's not a great deal overall.

Other than the posterisation, this pj produces a very nice image indeed. I'll probably get one some time soon and will take contrast measurements before and after calibration. I had good results with a Hoya FL-Day filter on my HT1000, so I'll be doing something similar with the H77 too, except in this case it will be a yellow filter as the blue is something like 20% higher than green, and red is 5% lower than green. An FL-Day balanced the red and green perfectly,but adding two filters (FL-D and a yellow) is probably not a good idea. It'll be fun experiemnting though.

If anyone else learns any tips and tricks for this machine please post them.

Gary.
 
I only got round to unpacking it a couple of hours ago and so have done little in the way of setup, however, the story begins ...

Unpack it, set it up on a temporary trolly to get an idea of positioning .. the numbers lead me to believe it'll fit on the shelf below my Sharp Z200E (soon to be sold ;))
Plug in the power lead, flick the 'power' switch to '1'
Nothing
Read manual .. could be up to a minute
Wait
Nothing
Read manual
Curse
Unplug known good lead from Sharp, plug into H77
Nothing
Read manual
Curse
:mad:
Begin to think about sending it back
Curse
Idly fiddle with the remote and for no good reason press the top left button with a red circle round it
POWER!
Read manual .. absolutely NO MENTION of a power button on the remote in the "how to power on" section :nono:

At the very least I had expected the blue LED about the power socket to illuminate when power was applied.

So, a quick AVIA for the basics (is it just me or is DVE utterly unfathomable as to where the test sequences are?), slap in "Fellowship of the Ring" to the PC .. magnificent. The Sharp produces a nice picture but at 1024x576 on a 92" screen the pixellation can be a little annoying, the Optoma's extra resolution solves that.

I'm no expert when it comes to evaluating projectors, I can't talk about colour fidelity, blacks and whites, greyscale accuracy etc. etc. .. what I can say is that the opening sequence in "The Two Towers" was an eye-opener.

I've seen comments before from people saying somethingorother "looked more three-dimensional" and for the first time I think I know what they mean. As the camera pans from right to left over the mountain tops in the distance and the peaks in the foreground start to move up from the bottom, I could see a 3-D effect which even the Sharp hadn't delivered, giving a depth to the scene and putting real distance between the various mountain ranges.

This gets even better when the scene cuts to the view going down the mountain-side before it dives into the rock .. the clarity of the ice-field was remarkable, as was the detail in the lake far below.

My only other initial impression is the noise .. or lack of it. As someone already said, this is a bright manchine and 'eco' mode is more than sufficient, at that setting it isn't silent but only emits a gentle whirring of air movement and no hint of colour-wheel whine.

Won't get much playing for the rest of the weekend, I'm hoping to watch FOTR 'as it comes' to get some 'feeling' for it before I do any more fiddling.

Fun. :D

One thing, can anyone tell me how to discover the firmware version? Nothing in the menus provides that info. In fact, the menu system is pretty un-impressive really, you can't even see the input signal details (resolution and refresh) which is a tad annoying (you can hit Re-sync but that's a pain).
 
As to the power switch, you have to press the blue lit button (not lit blue when off) as well as flicking the actual power switch. Agreed it does not actually state that in the manual but it's no different from most other kit that has a mains switch and a 'soft' power button.

To get in to the service menu and see the firmware version along with loads of other stuff prerss the Resync, Menu and Enter buttons on the toip of the unit at the same time. You should, hopefully, have firmware version c14.

Enjoy :D
 
I didn't realise that blue led WAS a button, I thought it was just some sort of fancy LED .. can't say I've seen such an arrangement before, I had expected the LED to show power availability. :confused:

No service menu :( .. pressing those buttons together, in any order, did nothing (except when I hit Re-sync first when it went into the re-sync sequence).

Can they have disabled that menu?
 
Absolutely not. Trust me. Press all 3 buttons together and it will pop up the service menu. You may need to do it a few times to get it right. It does work.
 
:rolleyes: .. no go, I've just pressed them about 20 times.

I have the power on and a DVI signal selected and am displaying a PC desktop .. am I supposed to be in some other mode for these buttons to work in this way?

I'm pressing the 1st, 3rd and 4th buttons on the top of the unit when viewed from the rear, missing out the second one marked Source.
 
Oops, my mistake. You need to press Resync, Source and Enter at the same time. Sorry :blush: That's what comes trying to do it from memory :suicide:
 
:) .. I thought I did try the possible options but maybe if it needs more than once to trigger I didn't try enough .. thanks Neil, I'll give it another go tomorrow.

Just finished watching FOTR, and all I can say is that if it's possible to get a better picture with a CRT then I doubt I'll spend the extra money. :D

Even without a full setup .. which to be honest I don't know how to do, particularly I don't know how to set gamma so I do it by 'feel' .. the increased resolution over the Sharp has eliminated pixellation and during the opening sequence when the camera is following the cart into Hobbiton I had one of those 'wow' moments which one gets with one's first projector but then rarely afterwards. :)

Especially revealing, literally, were the sequences in Moria. With the Sharp I was accustomed to good dark-scene performance, but there seemed to be so much more detail in the background throughout that section.

When I read people's comments such as "the colours look so real" I always question that idea, especially in a film like LOTR where Jackson deliberately tampers with the spectrum as a cinematographic tool .. however, the wide-area sweeps down the Great River and over the mountains were glorious.

One comment about the noise .. I discovered that when running in 50hz mode it's a lot quieter, in fact it is almost completely silent, the only sound being an intermittent very low-level buzzing which I suspect is a fan since it comes and goes, but can only be heard in totally silent sequences and only then if you listen hard .. when that fan stops the remaining 'woosh' (presumably another, constant fan) is only audible if you get very close.

Bottom line: a stunning machine. :smashin:
 
Sounds great! It does produce some very natural but rich colours judging by the one I saw. I'm umming and ahhing over it myself...

Did you see any posterisation at all like that often mentioned from U571 chapter 15? Bright lights in dark backgrounds have visible banding around them instead of a seemless graduation of light to dark? It's the only issue I've seen on the one I've demo'd, though the new firmware has reduced it a great deal.

Gary.
 
I don't have U571, though I do know the scene you're referring to. The nearest I know I have is the opening to Harry Potter 1 where there's are street-lights glowing in a slight mist (and of cource the flying motorcycle's headlight) producing a similar glow and I don't see any real problems.

However I'm using an HTPC based on the new NVidia codecs and they themselves still have a very occasional banding problem so even if I saw it I couldn't be sure without messing around which end of the signal chain would be the cause.
 
Sounds like you have a good one. :)

How does the NVidia compare with TT or PowerDVD?

Gary.
 
I'm using TT2 which comes with the NVidia codecs.

The combined effect of the NVidia codecs plus 6800GT is a lot clearer and cleaner than the Sonics and the 9600, the '3D' effect I mentioned above is even more noticeable for example and there's much less noise .. I've moved the 9600 over to an older PC and can A/B using the DVI switch I have. Since the older PC can't run FFDSHOW I'm using hardware support for comparison but don't consider that inappropriate.

Personally I've never liked PowerDVD since I A/B-ed version 5 with TT1.5/Sonics with my old AE300.
 
"much less noise"

I like the sound of that! One of my pet peeves is image noise and artefacts - if I don't see stuff in real life, I don't want to see them on my screen either, so the Nvidia solutions sounds pretty good. The 6800GT is quite an expensive card isn't it? Your comparison sounds fair, as it's an even playing field.

I did try TT on my system alongside PowerDVd 4 and 5, but it wasn't any improvement (if I can't see it, it's not there). It's also klunky for playing other files and movies from hard drive, whereas PDVD was point and click.

I have seen a small improvement with TT on a friends system compared to PDVD, so it does seem like it can vary from system to system, which seems a bit strange, especialy as we have the same graphics card.

With the Nvidia codecs work with an ATI card? Have you tried it?

Gary.
 

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