Right,
Just watched 2 movies back to back, one actiony(SW Ep 2) and one romanticy, Notting Hill. The Video is currently using composite and the Cable box is being piped through the Vid. DVD is a Sony 735D, using componant with the supplied 10m cable.
Apart from my ravings about image quality, you REALLY notice a good quality source. DVD is stunning, with rich colours and the image is really bright. TV looks a bit fuzzy and a TV sourced DVD(e.g friends) looks ok, but nowhere near as good as DVD. Normal VHS is about on the same par as TV. You can sharpen up the image to increase the clarity, but then when you switch to a DVD source you notice it's too sharp. I would say however that the image quality is as good as the 12HT and certainly magnitudes better than the HS1 and AE100 I had demo'd a few months back.
Ambient light is ok, but like all projectors it does need a dark room to really shine. I did'nt see any motion artifacts on the fast moving images, and it was able to display fine detail very well
Blacks are'nt too bad without cinema black on and pretty good with. However it does seem to dull the colours quite a lot by using C black mode, and to be honest I prefer it to be off.
It IS a quite long throw projector with a 6ft image at 12 ft. But that does mean that any screen door is pretty much non existant. If you walk up to the screen, you can see the screen door at a distance of about 12-18 inches. After that it's gone. It does'nt come with a short throw lens, and since the lenses retail at $1300 i'm not going to try one. If you have a small room then I think you will either need to look elsewhere, by the short throw lens or put up with a smaller image.
I will post photo's up, but my camera is only a 1.3 Megapixel unit and the ones I took do not do the picture justice. I need to borrow my neighbours 3.2Mp camera I think.
The Lead supplied seems to be reasonable quality, but I think the screening is a bit thin so you may have to be careful where you route it. The Manual is fine, typical sony fare and it's all easy to set up. The sideshot 2 seems to work OK, although picture quality is diminished if it's used to extremes.
Hmm what else...
Whether i'm one of the lucky ones I dunno, but dead pixels are not there, and I did look.
I bought it from Price Japan, who shipped it on Friday 22nd, it landed at heathrow Sat am and it was at my doorstep by 1pm today. Top service.
I've not seen any figures for lamp life, other than the specs. Sorry.
I don't have a PS2 or Xbox and my PC does'nt have a DVI port so, HTPC stuff is out. When the VGA cable is out in the UK i'll try and hook the PC up.
The manual mentions 1:1 pixel mapping, but i've no way of testing it out, sorry.
If you want me to find anything out let me know, and i'll try it.