Reply With QuoteI can see the rainbow, and it doesn't bug me. It doesn't bug me because I don't own a DLP. I just watch it at friend's who do have one. I suspect that if I had it at my own home, it would drive me batty having to see it all the time.
So our 3-LCD projector is dying, the blue LCD is burning out resulting in a blue haze over the right half of the picture.
I was all hot to trot to get the Casio Green Slim XJ-A235 projector with like 20,000-hour bulb life. In fact, I ordered one when a Slickdeal from Newegg came along.
Then we got it home and tried watching a movie on it, and holy shit, the DLP rainbow effect! Both my wife and I were seeing it a lot in high-contrast scenes. I was frankly shocked. I thought I would be somewhat sensitive to it (I've always been unable to play games without vsync, so I know I'm pretty aware of sub-frame tearing on all fronts), but it was quite amazing how obtrusive it was. In fact it became borderline eyestrain quite quickly!
THEN I realized Newegg had a no-return policy :-P Fortunately I was able to sell it to a coworker with substantially fewer rainbow-effect qualms. And even better, another Fatwallet deal came along for a new Epson 3-LCD projector from CowBoom.com for $450, so I jumped all over that and I think I got the last one :-)
But in any case, I am now curious to know some crap statistics. And what better way to gather them than a Qt3 poll!
(Edit: Obviously this poll only applies to you if you've seen single-chip color-wheel-having DLP TVs or projectors, especially in a dark room. The rest of you, the last option is all yours.)
Last edited by RepoMan; 05-19-2011 at 12:58 PM.
I can see the rainbow, and it doesn't bug me. It doesn't bug me because I don't own a DLP. I just watch it at friend's who do have one. I suspect that if I had it at my own home, it would drive me batty having to see it all the time.
DLP was on its way out when I was buying my TV, but I did look at some sets, and never noticed the rainbow effect.
My parents have a DLP. I've had to replace the bulb twice and still never seen this effect.
Had a DLP as my primary for a few years and now it is in the bedroom and no rainbow for me.
If you saw one of the later ones with RGB LEDs, it was virtually unnoticeable. You only see it on the ones with a projector bulb and spinning color wheel. I had just such a DLP for many years. It's lightly annoying, but every display technology has its artifacting, so.Originally Posted by Hugin
Now are we talking about a DLP Rainbow?...
or a FULL ON DLP RAINBOW!
I saw both types, though the color wheel models I was seeing at that point would have been 6 segment, higher speed wheels, not the older 3 segment slower ones. So that would have helped.
Ultimately I wound up getting a plasma. :)
We've had a DLP for the past five years, and it's not been a problem.
i can't answer the poll because, yes i do see rainbow, but only if i rapidly shake my head.
Double DLP rainbow all the way.
Phew, at least two other people are similarly sensitive, so I don't feel tooooo totally crazy. No wonder they sell well if most people really can't see / don't care. Very interesting results! Glad I posted this, would poll again, A++++
They don't sell well AT ALL these days, of course. They were only really popular in the brief window between CRT dominance and flatscreen dominance.
Depends if you're talking displays or projectors. They still sell mighty well in the projector world. (We're a projector-lovin' bunch of fools at our house... would rather have the little box on the ceiling than the big-assed black rectangle dominating the wall.)
Oh, right, yeah, projectors. Forgot about those.
My current DLP is an LED model and doesn't have a color wheel, but before that I had a bulb version and never once saw the rainbow, even trying to pick it out.
It's a shame the tech died a premature death due to the fascination with thinness. Yeah, thin matters if you're going to wall-mount. But if it's on a stand, as long as it's relatively thin, who cares? By going DLP, I was able to get a 67" 1080P screen in 2008 for about $1,500. At that time, LCDs > 50" were $3K and up.
Yeah, I had a DLP for a long time too, Denny, but plasmas are better for reasons that have nothing to do with thinness. True 1080p (I think even current DLPs still use wobulation? Those 2006-era ones definitely did), much brighter image, better visibility from angles, better visibility in sunlight, no optical distortions from projection, no overscan, PLUS they're thinner, and not so expensive any more (I paid $1700-something for a very good 57" plasma).
Man, that's a buncha money. We just paid about $550 (including a one-year replacement warranty) for a 720p 3-LCD projector, and it puts out a friggin' 80-inch picture. Of course, it's not as bright as a plasma, and it's not 1080p, but for 1/3 the cost I'm very happy living with it.
(Heck, I only have an old non-Elite 360 anyway. Does the Elite version do full HD video -- 1080p video -- over HDMI from Netflix? It obviously doesn't do Blu-ray....)
We might upgrade to 1080p / 3D in a few more years when the XBox 720 comes along, but for now, we are plenty happy sticking at the 720p level.
I don't think Netflix actually streams higher than 720p. And yeah, a projector is sweet if you have the room for it. My (rented) living room with piles of windows would pretty much comprehensively not work for a projector.
Plasmas have a lot of advantages over DLPs, but I'm not sure that brightness is one of them. Over projectors, maybe, but our rear-projection DLP can be blindingly bright. And I've never noticed any projection distortion on our set, nor the rainbow effect. Plasmas do have a better black level, though, as well as many of the other advantages you listed.
We went with DLP back in the day partly because they were cheaper than competing technologies, partly because plasmas at the time had issues with burn-in (bad for gaming), but mostly because we compared various sets in the store and just really liked the picture quality of the DLPs. That said, the other techs have come a long way over the years, and the prices have come way down, and if we were to look at new TVs today, we might very well go with a plasma or LCD.
mk, but a 67-inch plasma didn't exist in 2008. At least, not at a consumer price.
Repo, the dark room requirement for a projector is a no-go for me. We're often doing other things in the media room while the TV's on... And it seems to me that projector (dark room) and Kinect (well-lit room) wouldn't play nice together.
Well, our projector works OK with the lights up, just not as spectacularly. But it's certainly fine for Kinect. (Kinect can actually work in near-darkness due to the IR -- check out this rave-dancing action.)
Our downstairs rec room's south-facing front windows are small and up high, so easy to cover with sun shades when we're watching something in the afternoon. But then again, it's been so long since we owned an internally luminescent display that I may be underselling how nice it would be to have one. (We also like that the kids can't reach the projector, so it is only on when we say so....)
Isn't DLP an old tech at this point?
We have a bunch of DLP projectors at work, and they drive me nuts. If I turn my head while the projector is in my field of view, I get rainbows.
One of the big gripes I remember hearing about DLP tvs at the time was their weight, and how expensive they were to service. I always thought the tech was pretty neat.
Weight? While my DLP TV is pretty large housing a 56" screen two people can easily pick it up. A plasma doesn't way much more than it and its a flatscreen. 109lbs vs 133 and mine was one of the last bulky, heavier DLP TVs they made. Honestly I find them easier to carry than a plasma just because of how the weight is distributed.
Compare that to my old Sony 36" CRT that's almost impossible to move at 240lb+.
I can see rainbows, but only if I really try. Still not going to buy another DLP though, absolute plasma convert these days and my DLP just died a couple weeks ago. Replaced the color wheel twice now and I am tired of it - time for the junkyard.
I've got a ~120lb 43" 4:3 DLP that's from the early 2000s. It's extremely top heavy, owing to the fact that the speakers are situated underneath the screen, with an additional "stand" section under that. Given their propensity for throwing the lamp through the screen if tilted too quickly forward, and its slight forward lean in weight, moving this thing feels constantly fraught with peril.
The plastic on the bottom stand section is extremely malleable and is already cracking, so you typically sort of have to dig your fingers into the thin line between screen-section and speaker-section. Given its incredible weight and height, yeah. . .
. . . and now the color's gone horribly out of alignment, apparently due to failed convergence chips. I could pick up a complete repair kit, learn to solder, and repair it myself if given $150 and several extremely stressful hours of free time. . . or I could accept the fact that maybe DLP isn't perfect, either, and move on to a more expensive set.
It will be hella weird to buy a TV that's technically of comparable size and lose the vertical height. On the other hand, to get the ~25.5" vertical inches I've got now, I'd need to buy a 52" 16:9 set, and I am pretty positive that's way out of my lower middle class income. Maybe I'll just stick with all the blue being shifted several inches to the left and all the red being shifted several inches to the right :)
Armando, are you sure that's a DLP? Because that kind of convergence issue is usually something you see where there are three light sources, and most DLPs only have one. Maybe they made a three-chip DLP back in the day?
As far as weight goes, my 61" DLP was lighter than my 57" plasma. It's bigger, sure, but it's all air inside.
No, totally, there was definitely a period of time when a DLP was the thing to get.
DLPs are not at all heavy. They weigh about the same as a similarly-sized LED set, and considerably less than a similarly-sized plasma. They look like they should weigh more, but you have to remember that it's just a big, mostly empty plastic box.
I have no idea how expensive they are to service, because it's ridiculously easy to service them yourself. Replacing the lamp (which we had to do after five years) was as simple as replacing a light bulb. Which is basically what you are doing. I also replaced the color wheel in our set (we had one of the early models in which the bearing on the color wheel had a tendency to go bad). That was a little more involved, but not actually difficult.
On the one hand, plasmas lack the cost of lamp replacement. So there's that. On the other hand, they do lose brightness over time, just like DLPs, and the only remedy is to throw out the TV and buy a new one. In any event, the retail price on DLPs is so much lower, I suspect that the overall cost over X years still works out to be less, even when you account for maintenance.
It is entirely possible that I have been seeing DLP and thinking rear projection for the entirety of this thread. Please disregard anything I have said :D
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