13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
Our own home theater room, at last!
Date of Review: Apr 11, 2007
The Bottom Line: For home theater applications, its perfect. I see no reason why it wouldn't be perfect for business use, so I am buying another for the company.
We finally decided that this year (January 2007) was the year we would replace the old Samsung CRT TV in the basement and build ourselves a home theater room. We considered all options with lots of hand wringing and hair pulling, taking note of the alleged short life of the plasma TV and the size limitation of the LCD TVs as they presently stand.
Our viewing habits are not compulsive either (unless you consider back episodes of Black Adder and Coupling a compulsion). We rarely watch unless it's for a rented movie or the aforementioned.
Our final device of choice was a ceiling mounted projector and out of the models available at our local tried and trusted Tigerdirect we chose the ViewSonic PJ458D. Our local branch had a projection wall where we could 'play' with live units, tilting them and testing all the features. This is an excellent way to choose a projector.
Why this choice?
Cooling: Bulb life and overall reliability of the device is likely to be seriously affected by the running temperature of the unit. The PJ458D has superb and quiet fans to move air through it make it run cooler than the other models we viewed.
Price: we paid around $650 after rebates and this was good value compared to other models.
Size: the PJ458D is small by comparison to its competitors. With a footprint no larger than 9.5" x 8" it stands just under 4" high. It weighs 4.5 pounds which is lighter (I think) than the well engineered Mustang mount I used to fit it to the ceiling.
Brightness: 2000 lumens. What does that mean. We use ours to project onto the end wall of our room and in most conditions it is good viewing, even in bulb-saver mode which reduces the intensity of the light below 2000 lumens. For its price this was the best light output at the time, 2,500 lumens being somewhat more expensive.
Image size: Many of the cheaper projectors compromise on maximum image size. The PJ458D went up to 1024 x 768 pixels which is more than enough for our 100" homemade TV screen.
Input flexibility: As a bit of a computer tinkerer, I wanted to make sure that whatever rig I created for driving this unit would be able to be connected efficiently and with the benefit of multiple inputs. The PJ458D has 3 inputs types (S-Video, VGA and Composite) which allows you to select between input (and potentially, video sources) on screen.
What's in the box?
The PJ458D itself of course, and its remote control.
A RGB or VGA cable and a S-Video cable. These are quite short and only suit its main function as a portable presentation device.
A soft carrying case.
Power cord and audio cable.
A Useful user guide which you can forget about after the first hour.
A CD-ROM including a set-up wizard.
Installation
Having got over the novelty of the PJ458D by screening onto every available surface from every available video source, we proceeded to mount the unit upside down on the ceiling using the Mustang mount. The PJ458D comes with screw holes in the base for the mount and fitting it upside down enables all the top controls and indicators to be accessible from below. The unit has a ceiling mount function in its on screen set-up function that flips the image so it ends up the right way up.
A quick adjustment of the keystone using the remote control and we were in business. Keystoning is the effect of having the image source anything but dead center in-line with the projected image. It results in an image with perhaps parallel top and bottom edges but sides that taper together. This is cunningly corrected without any noticeable distortion.
Niceties: We drilled a two inch hole in the ceiling and ran extended S-Video, Composite and RGB/VGA cables out and down a wall to a temporary stack of amps, DVD player and an older IBM laptop that we now use exclusively for computer projections (photographs and home made movies etc). Using the remote we are easily able to switch between the Composite (DVD player) and VGA (laptop), on screen. We haven't found a use for the S-Video, yet.
We finished the project off (for now) with a matt, grey screen painted onto the projection wall. Why matt and why grey? There are plenty of web sites that explain this but we are still experimenting with the correct shade of grey!
I cannot tell you what is on the CD-ROM. We should play with it someday as I know very clever people go to a great deal of trouble to prepare these. However, being somewhat technical we find these things mostly redundant.
Use
We leave the device turned on most of the time, which means it is in standby mode, no bulb lit and just a blinking green light flashing from below. A click of the remote and the device warms up the bulb taking about 30 seconds. It then hunts for available video sources. If you turned on the DVD player in time and popped a DVD in, it will find the source and you are in business without any more ado. The remote is a very powerful device and you can point it at any wall (the conditioned reflex is to point it the screen) and it works. The remote can be used to switch between sources. So, say you want to look at those digital photos you took, just select the VGA input and now the laptop is the source. Click again and your back to the DVD.
The bulb has two brightness levels, normal (2,000 lumen I guess) and bulb-saver mode – a little dimmer. In the later mode the bulb is dimmed and the fans run slightly quieter. The bulb has a typical life of 2,000 hours which caused us some paranoia in the beginning as these are usually big buck$ to replace amounting typically to half the price of the unit itself. However there is a hours counter in the on-screen set-up and we have been able to demonstrate that we watch movies a lot less than we thought we did. A bulb should last us many years and the bulb-saver mode is designed to extend that life.
While we are in set up there are numerous controls that you can use to fine tune the image quality depending on the type of file your viewing (movie versus photographs) and your tolerance for white peaking. Many of these are fairly technical and well described in the handbook so I will save you the annoyance of me trying to explain them here. Many of the more common set up functions (such as keystoning) are brought out to a button on the remote.
One of the first rentals we watched was An Unfinished Life which was a worthy test for the projector. Wide panoramic shots of Wyoming landscape as well as some action cinematography tested the brightness, color rendition and smoothness of the image excellently. The PJ458D was not found wanting. We loved the movie the landscape and the ViewSonic. From seats under the projector itself we enjoyed wide screen life in the Big West without undue pixilation or distortion.
Any focus and zoom is done manually using holes in the top of the case (now the bottom if ceiling mounted) and once done can be left alone provided you bought a good solid mount like the Mustang.
Conclusion
Our In-Focus 'company' projector now seems so old and clunky that we plan to replace it with another ViewSonic PJ458D as soon as we can. Does that say enough?
