Hey everyone, I stumbled upon this site tonight and have been reading for the past 6 hours

I'm running a small recording studio, and tonight I was looking at 23" lcd's, on one page a noticed a link to DIY projector sites and found this. Now the idea of building a 30" projector is dancing through my head and I have a few questions.

First, I like to run at a high resolution, if you've ever run a program like Cubase or Sonar you will understand why. Right now im running at 1280x1024 on a 17" CRT, on a screen in the 30" range I would prefer to run atleast 1600-1200 or even higher. I've been checking out 15" lcd's and most only list a resolution of 1024x768, however my current 17" technically only runs at 1280x1024 but I have been able to push it into the 1920x1080 mode (although the picture needs alot of adjustment).

Would it be feasable to run a 15" lcd at higher than 1280x1024 and what risks are there in doing this?

Secondly, how close can your projector be to the screen? I'm dealing with between 4 and 6 feet of space and most people seem to be dealing with atleast 10 feet.

Thanks.

Heh, that's probably just the tip of the iceburg if you decide to build a projector!

LCD monitors have a set number of pixels. Sending a different resolution to an LCD monitor just means that either the picture will be streched, shrunk, cropped, have black borders, or not be displayed. If the monitor can't handle the resolution you're sending it, you probably just wont get a picture, I doubt it would cause any damage.

Just so you know, a typical 15" LCD monitor will have 1024x768 pixels. If you send it a higher resolution it'll probably just shrink the higher resolution onto the 1024x768 available pixels. This usually makes the picture look terrible. If you're looking for high resolution, the best way to go is to use a WUXGA laptop LCD (like me) that has a resolution of 1920x1200 in a small package (15.4"). The down side to going with this monitor is the price ($550 and up usually).

The projection can probably be any length. The problem with a short throw is that the projector will usually end up in between the screen and the viewer. Since we make such large projectors that usually means a portion of the screen will be blocked from the viewer. I'd say with 4 - 6 feet you'd probably want the projector to be right above your head, if you don't mind the big box right over your head, and you can build it that way, there shouldn't be much of a problem.

After reading a few PLOGs I figured that would be the case



Would anyone happen to have a source to check these out, I checked a few of the sites I regularly checked and none of them had a WUXGA LCD, then I googled it and found mostly articles pertaining to the LCDs.



That was what I was banking on, based on the dimensions of the room the projector will mostly likely be above and slightly behind the seating position.

I would like to make the projector as small as possible, so I am going to do some research and see what my options are, ambient light will also be a problem so I will need to find a way to overcome that.