Projector heaven

Ask any film fan what their ideal way to watch a film is and they should all reply "a projector". We have "borrowed" a PJ from the chemistry department and hooked it up to my PC. We customised a sheet (read: cut it up) to act as a screen and hung it from a string at ceiling level. Certainly a crude setup (not least cos my room is tiny), but we were pleased to discover that with as little as a 2ish metre throw distance we got a nicely in-focus 45" picture. This obviously makes my 19" TFT screen now look tiny.

So far what we've watched has been fairly random: Evil Dead 2, Futurama and Bad Boys. Cos this is a data projector it's got a nice XGA resolution which means that the HD trailers from places such as Dave's Trailer Page look amazing. I'd pretty much made my mind up to buy a projector anyway, but this has confirmed to me how much more imersive films can be. Also it's helped me to be be wary of DLP projectors. In these, coulour is produced by a spinning colour wheel which can lead to a phenomenen know as the rainbow effect, where flashes of rainbows are seen in areas of high contrast. Both Blondie and I can see them, but thankfully we're not sensitive to them. Some unlucky people suffer migrane-like reactions to them in as little as 10 minutes and need several days to recover. Whilst they didn't have this effect on me, I'd still get annoyed by them - especially if I'd just fropped almost £1000 on a projector. LCD seems the way to go.

We're going to try and get the Lord of the Rings films done cos they definitely benefit from the big screen treatment. One other problem is the amount of heat this thing kicks out (it's something like a 1000lumen bulb) - it certainly didn't help the 30^oC temperatures in my room.