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[Chris McDonald]

I've read somewhere that you cannot run projectors on their side. Is this true for all LCD and DLP projectors?

I had an idea to use 3 cheap XGA projectors to do 2304x1024 on a rear projection screen from a PC. Seems like a cheap way to get a nice bright 1080p(with pixels to spare) screen.

Just an idea, not really for any professional application.

[Brad Weber]

Chris McDonald wrote on Wed, 29 October 2008 16:01

I've read somewhere that you cannot run projectors on their side. Is this true for all LCD and DLP projectors? I had an idea to use 3 cheap XGA projectors to do 2304x1024 on a rear projection screen from a PC.

I won't say for all projectors, but certainly for most.  I also don't know of any projectors that operate in a 'portrait' mode, so you would probably have to rotate the image using external processing.  And if you are thinking of this being an edge blended image across the three projectors, that requires some overlap so the resulting resolution would be less than 2304, maybe more like 1997x1024.

Quote:

Seems like a cheap way to get a nice bright 1080p(with pixels to spare) screen.

Maybe I'm missing something, but how does 2304x1024 have "pixels to spare" for 1080p?  1080p is 1080 vertical pixels, so you may have more horizontal pixels than the 1920x1080 resolution, but fewer vertical pixels.

[Chris McDonald]

By 1080p I'm referring to the consumer 16:9  standard 1920x1080. I'm thinking this might be a cheap way to get 1080p in my home theater.

The rotation can be done right on the PC in the video drivers. The only tricky part is finding a triple output video card that allows it all to be one desktop and not 3 separate desktops connected together(ie. not extended desktop). With extended desktop video dosen't exactly play nice across different desktops. There couldn't be any overlap because there is no way to do that in the regular video drivers. It might be doable in linux.

I would have to build 3 custom right angle mounts to go on the wall behind the screen spaced perfectly, at exactly the vertical center of the screen. There wouldn't need to be a huge area behind the screen, because each projector is only covering 1/3.

Currently 1080p projectors are pretty expensive. The cheapest I've seen was $2500 but only 1200 lumens. With this setup I would have 6000 lumens(3x 2000lumens) using $600 DLP projectors.

Then again when the time comes around to change 3 bulbs vs 1, the total cost of ownership favors a single 1080p projector.

Maybe I should just convince my boss to buy a 1080p projector that I could borrow for watching 1080p movies and just get a 720p projector for day to day use...