Getting rid of the screen door

[Brandon B]

My review of my new pixel smoothing attachment for my FP, for those of you who don't get into the front projection forum much.

BB

[George Bellefontaine]

The first lcd projector I owned was an early model Sharp and it had terrible screendoor. I bought one of these lens and it did help smooth out the picture. But one day when I was trying to improve on the adjustment I broke the darn thing.

[Kevin P]

I would think you could reduce/eliminate screendoor by defocusing the lens just enough to blur the lines.

Since the lines are smaller than a pixel, if you defocus just enough it shouldn't blur the image enough to affect the quality, or would it? (I've never tried doing this, and I don't have a LCD PJ to try it on either).

[Andrew Pratt]

Kevin that's what most of us do to get round the issue. This device sounds nice and I'd love to try it but not when it costs nearly 1/2 what my PJ cost!

[Brandon B]

Defocusing does work to an extent, and I had been doing it for over two years prior to buying this.

However, defocusing is just that. Your pixels become blob shaped, and do not preceisely erase the grid.

This is not a "blurring" lens. It creates an astigmatic "ghost" of the entire image, pixels and all. Thinking of it more like stacking two projectors and offsetting the image of one diagonally by just the width of the pixel grid lines. They are now gone, erased to the level of precision you are willing to put into aligning the thing at install. For LCD, it is a pretty major improvement.

And yes Andrew, it is pricey, and if you are happy with your image now, certainly not worth doubling(ish) your investment. But for someone getting upgrade itch or bothered by SDE, it's a good quality bump to keep the upgrade demons at bay until the Next Big Thing comes into a more affordable range. I had been eying the new Canon DILA machine. Now I can (probably) talk myself into waiting until 1920x1080 LCOS comes into the $5K arena, another year and a half or two.

BB

[Andrew Pratt]

In that light its a bargin

[George Bellefontaine]

Brandon, just be careful when you're adjusting that thing. I came on the adjustment screw a little too much and it broke. The unit cost me $600 CDN. and was beyond warranty when it broke. Maybe the models have improved since then and won't be as easy to break.

[Brandon B]

This is a newer model, and I have no complaints about the quality of its machining and construction. Thanks for the warning.

Worst case, though, we make custom lens mounts and such ourselves at work, so I could fix it if I did tweak it.

BB