Home Theatre 2.0

Our old projector that I had bought circa 2002 was starting to show its age—a green dot would show up in the center of the screen. I read somewhere that when this happens the only way to fix it is to overhaul the projector's innards and that it wouldn't just be a simple matter of replacing the lamp. Since we watch a lot of movies (via Netflix) we decided to replace the projector. I took the opportunity to upgrade the resolution and go with a 1080p High Definition projector from Epson, the PowerLite Home Cinema 6100. I looked online at http://www.projectorcentral.com/ to get throw measurements and reviews. Our projection wall is only so large and the projector sits at a certain distance from the wall, so we have to get one that can adjust its throw. This Epson model does that and is true 1080p, meaning it's the highest resolution you can get at the moment. It's also 3-LCD and doesn't have a color wheel so we wouldn't get the rainbow effect that some of the 1-DLP projectors would exhibit.

Since we were upgrading the projector to HD, I took the opportunity of upgrading the DVD player to Blu-Ray as well. I got a Samsung BD-P3600 that comes with WiFi connectivity. So above are two shots of the wall when projecting Quantum of Solace and Master and Commander. Can you tell which one is in High-Def? It may be hard to tell because I took these around 9am, so the contrast isn't that great and the scenes are somewhat dark. (Master and Commander was Blu-Ray, Quantum of Solace was not.) I think to really see the difference we would need a test pattern of some sort, e.g., some checkerboard floor extending out to infinity. I think the HD format would show less aliasing than the older format which I think is about half the lines of resolution. I think the resolution is much improved, and we can also now get video-on-demand from Netflix via the internet (and Pandora music as well, but that doesn't work as well since the music doesn't seem to want to stream in 5.1 surround so it makes more sense for us to stream music via iTunes and connect to multiple speakers [also via WiFi] to the living room amp and to speakers in the kitchen, as we currently do—we use the Apple airport stations that just plug in to the wall and connect to a pair of speakers). Both the projector and DVD player were less than the cost of the original projector. And of course no more green dot!