Thursday, December 02, 2004

BYO LCD Projector

ever though of building your own LCD video projector? well I Have. and now I see someone has done EXACTLY what I was going to do and it works! how awesome is that. the contrast/brightness is probably a bit poor. (as in you will only be able to watch it in a dark room) but who cares. its cheep! now all I gotta find is an old video projector that takes those 10$ bulbs (as compared to the 300$ bulbs in the professional projectrs). check it out at TOMs hardware and be sure to go through a few pages and get the 20meg video to watch of how to construct it.

2 comments:

forkev said...

absolutely amazing!
slap another fresnel lense in there, get a few bigger bulbs and your off and runing!
oh baby! what a find.
now i know what I want for christmas: a broken monitor (lcd) and some 50 year old technology with a cord.

i think it'd be cool to over build a compact design that kinda 'folds out' to be the right demsnions for light and mirrors and stuff, but that would compress into a suitcase. woth a bit of work, you could keep the volume of the compressed side about 1.5 - 2x the size of a regular projector, with MUCH more inexpesive operating costs (bulbs).
great find.

k2h said...

the 3m 1720 for $199 looks like a pretty good deal
http://www.staples.com/Catalog/Browse/Sku.asp?PageType=1&Sku=506564

it uses an ENX type bulb. cost 6.50$ online or 25$ each in a store, so not to bad. the bulb is like 350 watts. (85Vdc?) so thats kinda cool. way better than the 500$ bulb cost on some projectors. yes, I did see over 500$.

I'm seriously considering building one of these. mind you an LCD projector that will do 3000 lumens can cost like 3000$ or more (I saw a prjoector for 7k$). i'm not sure what the effective lumens would be through a normal LCD but it has got to be pretty good. I may have origionally underestimated this technique.