DIY High-Quality XGA Projector for ~$300

ranrub writes "Tom's Hardware Guide posted a guide to building your own XGA LCD projector from parts costing under $300. Major components are an overhead projector and a used 15" LCD screen. They even have a movie of the whole project on site! It's quite bigger and noisier than a standard projector, but most of our living rooms look like electronic junkyards anyway, don't they?"

Not quite the same...

[xchino]

The image is a bit blurry and usually darker than those expensive multimedia projectors. But the bulbs are cheaper to replace, and it's suitable for watching movies with your friends on walls and such. I'd recommend forgoing the overhead lamp and getting yourself a much more high powered light source, and a top quality fresnel lense, it will still probably be cheaper than the overhead projector, and having a brighter light source means a bigger or brighter picture. Couple one of these with a low powered am/fm transmitter and you're ready to host a Guerilla Drive in [google.com]

Fun

[xpurple]

I did this years ago, and kept running into problems with cooling. Even with a fan in there the screen became washed out after a few hours of use.

Part of this might have been due to the fact that I was using a DSTN screen.

I have one...

[lxt]

Indeed, I have one lying around somewhere. It was a 640x480 LCD mounted in a metal casing about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, and around 3 inches thick. It would sit on top of the projector, but had a tendancy to overheat (the OHP light heating up everything inside the casing as well...).

Post-Box Office Movie Experience

[LighthouseJ]

I help my school show movies to the general public so I can authoritatively say No. Our school pays between $250 for well-out-of-box-office movies upwards to $800 for popular just-out-of-box-office movies. You pay for not only the right to show the movies publicly but also for to right to show the movie before it comes out on home video. For instance, our school is going to show Ray about a month before it comes out on video next semester and it'll cost us $800 but we don't charge at the door (money comes from students anyway but through the budget from tuition).

There's actually a release timeline for movies and movie availability for us falls right after availability for airlines. We also only get movies in VHS format because we can't handle the 16mm or 35mm films, and they won't send us DVD's because of piracy. yeah, I know you can record off of VHS but it's cumbersome, plus the distributor inserts their tag in the movie.

As for the MPAA, I figure it just hasn't become a "phenomena" yet. Also, when say a movie is shown like Team America: World Police that is out of theaters but not on video, people might see it for free but they don't get to walk away with a copy just by seeing it. However, seeing movies for free over the internet, the people do get to keep a copy because that's the method of distribution, making another copy, so they do perceive that as a loss of a sale. I guess they will get off their laurels when they claim they are losing billions to the guerilla drive-in's.

THE OFFFICIAL THREAD

[LordMyren]

THE OFFICIAL THREAD [diyaudio.com] on Diy Projectors.

I still love mine.

Re:Fun

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are having heat problems you need to put a 45 deg cold mirror between the light source and the LCD panel. They are expensive but they allow you to greatly increase the lumens which you can thow out because there is less infrared heating of the LCD panel. http://www.edmundoptics.com/onlinecatalog/displayp roduct.cfm?productid=1900&CFID=3282620&CFTOKEN=dcc c6c4571313046-39113206-3048-41AD-84BFA8B603869B78 [edmundoptics.com]

Money, heat, noise, size...

[LBt1st]

It's just not worth it. I got a used NEC projector off ebay for $550 (inc. shipping). If your setting up home theater, do you really want to have a huge, loud and hot mess sitting behind your viewers?
Pay a little more and get a nice ceiling mounted projector with all the inputs, remote control etc..

Also, brightness isn't everything. You need to be concerned about contrast. Anyone can jam a 3000lu bulb into a box. But if you want image quality, well you get what you pay for.

Re:LED Bulbs?

[Misagon]

I just looked this up.

Luxeon Star/O produces 180 cd with color temperature 5500 K.
I don't know much about optics, but I found a formula: lumens = cd * 4pi.
So, 180 cd * 4pi ~= 2262 lumens.
So, with four of these would yield 9048 lumens where as a typical projector bulb would produce 10'000 lumens. I don't know if this is correct. Someone with more knowledge of optics should correct me!

The four LEDs would cost close to $100 + driver circuitry but they should last for at least five years.
A problem, as mentioned before is that common projectors are based on a single light source. We would need additional lenses or diffusers or we could get a splotchy picture.