Update:
As an aside, it'll be all change at Chez Wooders soon.
As noted, last autumn we received delivery of a new 55" OLED TV. The picture quality is quite breath-taking. At roughly the same time we had a change in the internal geography of the house, and ended up with a seating distance from the TV which created a viewing angle not too dissimilar to that of my projector screen.
I have to be honest, I've enjoyed more films on the OLED (in both senses of the word) in the last few months than I have with my projector set up.
The main problems with the projector:
- Not as bright as the OLED
- Blacks not as dark as the OLED
- Subsequently, contrast not as great as with the OLED
- Changes in lamp over the life would require frequent calibration to ensure stable and accurate colours
All of that is an impact on raw PQ, but there are other factors.
- Not to put too fine a point on it, come 8:00pm on a Friday night, getting out of the sofa and sojourning up two flights of stairs, firing up the projector, altering the masking (if necessary), is all a bit much.
- The general set up of my (or any) cinema room is just that bit less comfortable. Same with the real cinema, I suppose. Having to sit in the pitch black, can't see your beer, etc.
Having had a good, long hard think about it, and being completely honest with myself, the above has stopped me seeing quite as many films as I'd like, or enjoying them quite so much when I did see them. And thinking about it, I've really enjoyed watching new films on the OLED, and haven't once felt I was suffering in any way by not going upstairs to the cinema room.
Over the past 12 years or so I've had 4 cinema rooms, with different set ups, and various times when I've done without. If I'm brutally frank, (and this is actually quite difficult to say), the cinema rooms were really just an attempt to escape the limitations of TV's shortcomings. Those shortcomings have now diminished to the extent where projection shortcomings stick out like a sore thumb.
There are pros and cons to any set up. The only pro to the projector is the large size. That's still a factor. But it's far less of a factor now that TVs have got that much better, that much bigger, and (by happy coincidence) my lounge means I'm sitting that much closer.
The final straw was this. I was in London over the weekend, and watched a film at the cinema. Big screen, as in properly big. I realised that the boost the size gave over my home cinema was larger than my home cinema over my lounge, to the point where I realised I wasn't really getting much more of a boost from my projector at home at all. It was there, but just not quite such a big thing. Secondly, whilst the cinema was (in home terms) 4K/100% DCI/HDR, it wasn't actually as good as my projector at home, which it turn wasn't as good as my TV.
Ultimately it's about watching and enjoying the films, the quality TV drama, and the sport, as often as possible, and enjoying them as much as possible. And for that reason, I'm ditching the projector.
Due to the limitations of projector technology - limitations which I simply don't see it possible to deal with - I don't think I'll be going back.
It will possibly not be possible to project an image to anything like the brightness levels of a decent TV. It will possibly never be able to improve black levels to that of a decent TV. It'll probably never be possible to watch a projected image and get a decent picture in anything other than pitch black (or as close as you can get it).
However, as TV sizes increase, I may well end up with a cinema room with a flatscreen instead of a projector. We'll have to see.
Steve W