Slashdot Mirror
Building Cheap 100 Inch TVs
Nastar writes "If you visit eBay and such places there are guys selling 'kits' so that you can easily build your own 100 inch projection screen. There are websites such as 100InchTV selling the instructions for around $10 a pop. They say "this is the only product of this kind on the web" and "it is now possible to convert any type of television or computer monitor into a 100 inch video system that's truly amazing!". I don't like the idea of these people selling this information, especially when you can get it free from the good people at BSTV BSTV. Ihaven't built mine yet, but the reports of quality differ from so-so to fantastic! I suppose it depends on perfecting the technique involved. "
I can't believe this is on Slashdot... so disappointing.
This is as stupid as blowing up a 150x150 pixel image to 1600x1200 in photoshop and expecting a good result.
You'll end up with a dark, low contrast, blurry mess, but go for it.
I would imagine that the resulting quality would depend partly on the quality of parts you use. A 3.5" portable tv certainly won't project a 100" image of the quality a 32" tv would. You still get what you pay for. But I wouldn't be too concerned with the average joe tearing apart tvs (or putting them back together) just yet. Speaking of which, don't tvs contain very large capacitors that hold deadly amounts of power for a long time? Whatch those fingers.
How is this any different than (say) O'Reilly selling books on Perl/Oracle/Linux, when people can get all that information for free on the web as well ? Someone has gone to the trouble of packaging the information, and sending it to people who may not even have web access, or may want printed instructions, so I say all the more power to them.