How would you like to have the biggest TV picture on your block? Wouldn’t it be great to watch football players that are life sized in your living room? Try Optoma MovieTime DVD Projector.
I have to admit I am a bit of a gadget freak. I always want the coolest software for my computer. I have a PDA. Cell phones are the only phones in our house. I have GPS, satellite radio, wireless networking and lots of other stuff. I just had to have it, and I use most of it all the time.
When projection televisions came out I was really excited, but I didn’t like the restrictions, or the cost, or the space they took up. Next came out LCD and plasma televisions. It seemed like they cost more than I paid for my house. They do cost as much as my first car. Then I started hearing how fragile they are.
High Definition television was the latest thing, back in the day, but not too many networks were broadcasting in HD at that time. HDTV is one new thing out there that I’m not too excited about. I think there are two reasons. The first is I am happy with the quality of standard broadcast programs. The second is I am getting older and my eye sight isn’t what it once was.
Although definition isn’t that much of a thing for me, the crispness of the color, on the other hand, is important to me. The television we watch most in our house started taking longer and longer for the color to become correct after the set was first turned on. We were getting tired of that and we knew it wasn’t long before we were going to have to replace the set. We started seriously looking at our options.
We pretty much ruled out a standard definition television because, by all reports, the end of standard definition was near. I didn’t want to spend the big bucks for an LCD or plasma television, not because they aren’t great to view, but because I thought their screens were pretty small for the price tag.
One day we walked into a Radio Shack. They were demonstrating a projector with a built-in DVD player. It was great. The projector was about 24-inches away from the surface it was projecting on, and the image was larger than our 37-inch television at home. The price was high, but under half what a smaller flat screen would cost me, so I was interested.
You should know that we saw this demo on a sunny day, inside a store with all the lights on (it was Christmas time). It was projecting on to the ceiling, and not a smooth ceiling at that. The conditions, to say the least, were poor. I was blown away. It looked great.
We looked everywhere for information, and in a nut shell, here is what we learned. The Optoma, not the brand that was being displaying at Radio Shack, is rated the best in all respects (other than it comes with onboard speakers only, out of the box). The Optoma has great speakers onboard. It has the best resolution. It has the longest life for the bulb. It will accept any type of input I can think of, your computer, DVD, VCR or digital camera and it will project HDTV. It has a variety of input jacks. It puts out the brightest light from its bulb of any models available now. It also has the most flexibility in settings, like adjustments to overcome keystone effect. Another really nice thing about Optoma MovieTime projectors is the price. It has dropped by 50% from their introductory price, and 30% from December 2005. Often a bonus is offered with the purchase, generally a projection screen.
Why are they so expensive? What do they have to offer that other multi-media projectors don’t have? Unlike other multi-media projectors, home theater projectors are designed for a specific purpose, home entertainment. They also come to you with a DVD player in the unit itself, plus speakers and an amplifier.
The Optoma MovieTime projector works great with a home theater sound system. Yet another nice feature is, you can take it with you. Take it to your next party and see the game as big as life or bigger. You will be the hit of the party.
So what are the draw backs? You need to come up with a way to tell the projector what TV channel you want to watch. We use a VCR as our means of channel selection. It produces a fair amount of heat. I still haven’t broken the habit of putting my iced tea too close to the fan vent of the projector. The ice cubes don’t last long. Another draw back is the cost of replacement bulbs, more than 1/3 the price of the projector.
If you have a lot of ambient light in the room the picture can be bleached out a lot, but I’ve never see it be so bad as to make me wish I was watching a conventional television, or wish I hadn’t bought it in the first place. And so you know, the bright light that does cause the bleaching is the ambient light near the projector, not the surface onto which the image is projected.
Something that may or may not be a problem for you is, where do you project it? In our home we dedicated an entire 14 foot wall to be our “TV”. The Optoma MovieTime projector is 12 feet away and projects a crystal clear image consuming the entire 14 foot wall.
So if you think you might like having the biggest television image on the block, think Optoma MovieTime. If you think you would like to watch sports in your own home and have the players be their actual size, think Optoma MovieTime. If you like video games, just think about it. I like old arcade style games. Imagine Pacman characters bigger than basketballs.
One word of caution for some people, you will loose a certain amount of control over your privacy. When folks stop over at your home, no matter what the reason, you will have a hard time getting rid of them. They seem to get mesmerized and can’t take their eyes off of your TV. It happens to me all the time.
Check out all the reviews you like. I’m pretty sure I know what your decision will be. Optoma MovieTime projectors are available from Staples, CompUSA and lots of places online.
