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CRT Primer
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Updated: April 2006 |
What's Best for Me?
 A Zenith
PRO 1200x based home theater circa 2005 (Projector provided by Curt Palme!)
This is a common question that I get emailed daily on, and the answer is that
you really need to come up with some guidelines as to budget, and how important
a home theater is to you. I generally tell people to budget $0.20-$0.50 per hour of
use for a projector. That covers the purchase price and any maintenance of the
projector. Now naturally if you buy a retubed projector, you’d expect to get
10,000 hours of use out of the tubes, so that projected $0.20-$0.50 per hour of run
time should come way down, but if you figure on $0.20-$0.50 per hour, you can easily
decide whether it’s worth $0.60-$1.50 to watch that 3 hour Survivor special or whether
you’ll watch it on your good old 27” TV.
Decide whether a home theater will replace you going out to the movies, or
whether it will only be used a few times a month. In general from known
resellers online and on
eBay , you get what you pay for. If you see two identical
projector makes models from the same reseller, and one is a few hundred dollars
more than the other, you can bet that the more expensive one has tubes in better
shape, or has some optional feature that brings the value of the set up.
I’ve outlined many of the parameters to consider above when deciding on a
projector. Nothing beats seeing a CRT (or digital) projector in action, so seek
out someone that has a unit installed, and take a close look to see whether
you’d be happy with the picture. If you’re looking at a digital, view a brightly
coloured scene like an outdoor sports game, and also look at a dark movie to see
whether the blacks are truly black and whether you can see rainbows in the dark
scenes on a DLP unit. Check out the focus of an ES set vs an EM CRT if you can,
to see the differences between the two.
Once you've decided on a particular projector or price range, take a look at
our Projector Rankings page to see if there
are any other projectors that are of similar performance that may work for you
as well.
An excellent resource for more information is
our CRT Forum
of course! I’m in the forum
often, and there are many other forums that deal with signal processors, screens
and source material that I’ve only quickly touched on above. Make
sure to also check out pictures of other CRT projector setups both
here on the site and
here in the forum. Sometimes the best ideas come from looking at what
other people have done!
Generally speaking though, if you compare similarly spec’ed sets, such as
comparing one 8” EM focus set to another, as long as the sets are in the same
overall condition, you will see some slight differences between makes and
models. If you put 100 people in a room to compare these sets, you will get more
or less an even split as to which is the favourite projector. You will not get
90% of the people pointing at one set saying that it’s the best or worst
compared to the others.
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