Slashdot Mirror
DIY Projector Plans Released
vroom writes "Lumenlab, a rapidly-growing website dedicated to the art of building LCD projectors, has just released its guide on how to build your own projector. The guide used to sell for $19.99, along with entrance to the "Premium Forums," where like-minded DIYers work together to constantly push this obsession forward. Not sure if building your own LCD projector is for you? Not a problem anymore. Just download the official torrent file of the guide and you're good to go. If you want to roam with the others in the Premium Forums, however, you'll still need to buy a membership."
Further investigation into the forums (which I originally assumed were 100% locked to guests, which proved not to be correct) led to this:
c =2898&st=40
http://www.lumenlab.com/forums/index.php?showtopi
So it does indeed look legit. Surprised they don't have something a little more visible regarding the announcement, though.
My roommate and I actually are going with this route (although we are poor college kids, so obtaining the parts is a slow process). We know a few people on campus that have used this method as well. Coming from an engineering school something like this guide isnt much help to me, but access to those forums have been invaluable, there's just the little things that you just dont quite think of when you're building your projector that other people have done (i.e. keystoning and different methods of implementing it), and plus it's nice to have a big community to help you along with something like this. Stripping down a LCD may seem intimidating, but with some tips from the community, it's something that can be easily achieved.
/me puts on my flame suit for forking over the $20 some-odd bucks and prepares for a raping.
Now...
Hardly "Just released" ! My personal copy of the lumenlab guide
says "Copyright lumenlab.com 2003-2004".
BTW It is a good guide, but the same information can be collected elsewhere.
http://izzotek.com/index.php?lang=en
http://www.diyprojectorcompany.com/
http://www.diybeamer.ch/portal/index.php (German, Ahh es macht so gut..)
http://www.gadaffy.ch.vu/
http://www.gwidijanto.fcpages.com/index.htm
Yet buying the guide allows access to the forums, which by itself is worth the price.
It's a great tutorial on how to convert a laptop TFT screen and a regular overhead projector into a great big screen! A good read, practical and down to earth.
It's a lot of work, there is some risk involved, and there are areas that don't come close to a commercial projector. Commercial projectors can pump out a lot more light than a diy pj... but the catch is that their bulbs are rated for only a few thousand hours and cost many hundreds of dollars to replace. Spending half the cost of your projector every year or so to replace the bulb, doesn't sound like much fun to me. Or you could keep it in it's box and only use it once a year to conserve the bulb... but then you're not getting your money's worth then either.
:)
:D
DIY pj's use metal halide HID lamps that last for upwards of *twenty thousand hours* and cost anywhere between $50 and $150 each. Have the thing on all day every day if you want
And there's no understating the worth of boggling the minds of your friends and family when you tell them you made it yourself
The guide is littered with "more details at our premium forums", "detailed description of how to do it on the forums", "which can be obtained in our store" etc. The guide is just a top of an iceberg. The previous "pay for the guide, get access to the forum" seemed more honest than current "get guide free, pay to access the forums so the guide is of any actual use to you".
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Yes, but for the most part it's not worth it. Projectors under 1000$ with tax are common nowadays, and replacement lamps are becoming cheaper too.
:) Nice, quiet, great picture (better than 95% of those projects turn out to look like), nice lightweight/neat/tiny/portable/good-looking plastic enclosure, built-in deinterlacing/scaling/bunch of video outputs of all kinds, remote control, keystone adj, warranty, etc. Didn't have to get parts from all kinds of places and spend tons of hours putting some ugly hack job together.
These DIY projectors seem cheap at first, but that's assuming you have some cheap LCD panel that'll work (nevermind I'd prefer DLP), and access to lots of very uncommon parts (optics, electrical lighting stuff, reflectors, insulation, etc), which they "conveniently" sell from their store at high prices (I bet they make 100x more money there than by selling the guide). If you have to buy a LCD at near full retail price and the rest of the stuff from their store, it's almost more expensive than buying a projector.
And the results, although better than I expected, are not incredible either. That's unless you have some high quality optics (more $ again), a great LCD screen (more $ yet again), a very good lamp setup (powerful yet won't melt the LCD and proper color balance/spectrum - more $$$), etc. And you end up with some big ugly big plywood case (it's got to fit a big LCD scren, lighting and all; some seem to redo it once or twice as their first or 2 design sucked) - not very good for the WAF [wife acceptance factor]. That's not counting the tools you need (tablesaw and such) nor your time. The only way it'll really be cheaper than pre-made cheap projectors is by using old stuff like lenses from OHPs and such, and then the quality sucks and all... And regardless there's tons of things you don't get (like no remote control, and you'll have limited connectors - only those that LCD had; perhaps only DVI, and things like that). Some will also lure you into "higher resolution" than cheap projectors, but then use optics and/or a poor design that effectively makes the picture no better overall anyways...
I've looked into it before, ended up buying a DLP projector instead
Unless you're doing it as a hobby, then perhaps it's more justifyable. Otherwise, projector prices have come down a LOT recently... I don't regret skipping the whole DIY thing!
The three things you want in an ideal projection lamp are
a) very high light output
b) very short arc length
c) very even colour spectrum
The reason b) is important is because the projection optics rely on having a point-light source. Light that's generated only a few mm off the focal point of the first lens doesn't follow the correct path through the optics and gets wasted (or pollutes the light that is going the right way, causing a blurry, washed out image.) Add a) and b) and you get a lot of heat in a very, very small space. Manufacturing a bulb that can do a and b and doesn't explode as soon as it's lit is hard. Add c and things are even harder.
I'm sure bulb manufacturers make a reasonable profit off their bulbs, but they aren't deliberately limiting the lifespan of these bulbs for the hell of it - it's just you only get two out of "cheap", "good" and "long-lived".
There are many more guides about building your custom made LCD projector around. From my experience it can be difficult to find them with Google. But here is a starting point for more and free practical guides to do-it-yourself DIY LCD projectors. There are also guides for building projectors from old dia projectors and tutorials to build overhead projectors yourself. You may even use a display from an otherwise broken and unusable laptop.
Just think, if anyone could squeeze 800x600 onto a 35mm LCD then they could produce 12000x9000
It's not how it works. That's why you don't see wall-sized 12000x9000 screens being just a seamless 10x10 matrix of 1200x900 screens, same pixel size, bigger image size. You can make bigger screens by making bigger pixels, and opposite, tiny screens with tiny pixels, like in the expensive "real" projectors. The problem is the number of interconnections, data lines for each pixel. You can squeeze in only as many while keeping the latencies at reasonable level, and the physical size has little (even if some) to do with it.
There are tiny XGA displays that could nicely go straight for such a projector, expensive like the hell, but they exist. The problem here is heat, they are way too heat-sensitive to survive it.
I was thinking more along the lines: Take it apart, change the distances between lenses, possibly add two fresnels or something like this, use normal LCD screen.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
2. Work
However, if you like DIY projects then this becomes 2. Fun and gets bumped up into the advantage section.
4. Connecting the DVD-player needs DVI connection ?
Not done it myself, but I have heard other people have done it successfully:
It's possible to convert RGBs SCART to VGA simply by directly connecting the pins between the connectors in the correct order (and possibly adding a cheap £1 chip to decode composite sync into horizontal + vertical syncs). The voltage levels are handily all the same.
The 15kHz horizontal sync means almost all CRTs can't use it (they have a minimum of 30kHz), but LCDs can cope with this fine.
So it would seem to be fine, as long as the DVD player has RGBs SCART output and your LCD has a VGA input. The extra work(/fun) is almost non existant compared to the effort of building the projector.
Not sure why the release of this particular set of plans is news, really. There are a ton of guides for DIY projectors, that go from simple fresnel based systems, through LCD + overhead projector, all the way to building the whole thing yourself.
FYI, see:
- Building a Home Theater (a guide and study of my own experience)
- Operation: Big Screen, using an OHP
- Inventgeek's guide
- Building an LCD projector from the ground up
And there are many more, just a g00gle away...Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you are using third world child labor, don't count your time at all, and happen to have all the tools and most of the miscellaneous supplies just lying around ready to be put into the transhcan, I'm guessing you might break even.
Of coursem that's if you don't mind poor color rendition, and have an enormous space for your projector.
Don't be put off by lamp life. 2000 hours? My first PJ lasted more than 4 years on its original 1000 hour lamp (it had about 1700 when I sold the house, and still looked fine). 2000 hours - that's 8 hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, or 5.5 hours a day, every day, all year. Unless you plan on just leaving the thing on all the time, it should take you a good two years to go through a 2000 hour lamp, and several HT projectors are sporting 4000 hour lamps now. Heck, by then you'll want a new projector.
Officemax recently had a PJ on sale here for $499. 1100 lumens, 4000h lamp, 2000:1 contrast. That's going to be hard to beat with a DIY setup.
Spend a couple of hours searching for a bargain, instead of building your own. You'll probably be happier in the end, and if you're married, you'll definitely be happier with the WAF in the end.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Once you've gotten your spiffy projector built, you might as well attach it properly to the ceiling. I didn't build my own projector, but I did build my own projector mount. I have pictures and more details available. I've built the mount for a couple of different types of projectors, but the design can easily work for just about any projector. Total cost ended up being 2 or 3 bucks for the hardware. I had a couple of old pieces of wood lying around, so I didn't have to buy that.
http://www.WinWithRealEstate.com/
I know that many of you will belive this to be a scam just as I did when me and a friend found it about 2 years ago. I plunked down the 20 bux at the time and then started reading the protected forums looking at the different ideas. After a month or so of gathering a list of things that I should get( basically what was most popular with many of the other builders) I decided that I would give it a shot and see if I could actually make it work. The build process was not very hard at all. I took my time building and measuring everything in about 2 weeks. When I first turned the projector on, I was waiting for it to not work and me to look like a fool to my wife. Much to her and my surprise the first projected images of Shrek where absolutley jaw dropping. Now, when ever we have a party or gathering at the house, everyone always wants to check out the gaming/movie projector as I sit there with a smug look on my face saying "Yea I built that for under 500 bux" Anyhow, here is a link to my finished working projector that has been running for over 1.5 years and is still great. http://www.lumenlab.com/forums/index.php?showtopic =1576
If you truely want a home theater, do not just blow this off as a scam. Putting a TV in a cardboard box to get a 120" picture that is crystal clear and high definition is a scam. This is true science. And you will be very pleased with what you come up with after you are finished with your DIY projector.
I know the idea is to get light emitting from a tiny point, hence the super expensive bulbs... but couldn't that be solved somehow, using a different configuration for the optics or focusing the light, etc.. It would be so much cheaper to just plug in maybe 6 100 watt regular household light bulbs. Possible?
Meh.
I'm not sure that the physical size of the bulb is at all related to the size of the LCD. My 35mm film projectors have a 35mm (obviously) wide area that contains the image to be projected, and the light source is a 1/2" spark gap inside an 8" long bulb. In this case, the length of the light source is almost half the width of the surface being projected.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
...but a number of the drawbacks relative to commercial projectors put me off after I really researched it in-depth. Assuming that you already know that size, noise and heat are inherently worse with an overhead projector, there are some other issues:
Throw distance / placement restrictions: most overhead projectors are designed to be used a presenter *at the front of the room*, while most people would prefer their front projection system to be located at the back. The el-cheapo overhead projectors have a single element lens with no ability to zoom- for a given screen size, the projector can only be put a specific, short distance from the screen. This is evident if you look at pictures of DIY projectors in action.
There are overheads with two- and three- element lenses, but they are less common (harder to find used) and significantly more expensive new. Even then, the adjustability is limited- you still will need the projector close to the screen. Which makes the noise / heat / size issue much more significant.
Uneven brightness: many overhead projectors have a significant "hot spot" in the center of the screen, and substantially dimmer edges. A three element lens will deal with this, but then again you're spending more than this kind of project justifies. Commercial projectors are much more consistent
Contrast: Black isn't very black- LCD panels designed for monitors don't block the extremely bright projector light source very effectively, so the best you will get is a dark gray, substantially degrading image quality compared with a commercial projector (resolution and contrast are the twin holy grails of projection and display quality).
Limited color gamut: I think one of the reasons overhead projector bulbs are so much cheaper is that they don't make pure white light. You can use color correction tools found in most video drivers to fix this to have more accurate color, but the side effect of such correction is to limit the range of color that can be displayed.
Don't get me wrong- I'm not some videophile snob, but if I'm going to put time and effort into something, I want it to be done right, and there's a limit to how good the results will be with a DIY projector that has nothing to do with your craftsmanship or skills. Rather than building one myself, I'm holding off until I can justify buying a commercial unit (which may be never).
But then again, I'm a professional with a family and a house. I would have been *all over* this in college- it's an awesome dorm room project.
-R