CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

BRIANJOHNSON · Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 92

OK Here's a short story all will appreciate. I have been moving recently and left some of my old crt tubes boards etc in my work van. So the other day I was using it to give a fellow co-worker ride to a local body shop. I unlock the door get into the van and he jumps in and see's a old 1031q red tube lying on the floor. He asks what it is, so I tell him. He says oh i have a man cave also with a projector. Thinking maybe we had a common bond . I make the mistake of asking what kind. And he replies I have a DELL. I just shut up and kept driving. Confused

emdawgz1 · Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 7949

Guess it depends, is he a friend??? I might try to save him, if not..... let him live with it.

rabies_70 · Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 6:28 pm Post subject:

I still remember the very first time I saw a CRT projector. It was sitting in a garage in Fairbanks Ranch. Up until that point I never even knew about home theater. My only reference to HT was a very rudimentary surround sound setup pieced together from things I found at Pawn Shops and such. Even still, The D50 sitting on the ground would not let me leave it behind. I remember looking at the remote control and being clueless, utterly clueless as to what the hell you would need so many buttons for. Then I picked up that heavy SOB and put it on the front seat of my pickup and drove home looking over at it the whole time.Showing it to my neighbor, showing it to the wife. Wondering what the hell this thing was that I had just gotten home. Sat on the internet that night for hours and hours reading and bookmarking. Checking ebay I found an ad by a seller called audiovideotechnician he had something printed like email me for a crt guide or something so I did, ended up at CurtPalme.com and now 26000 hours later I know. But there was a time when I didn't. If he's a friend and you have one setup, let him see it. If he squeaks, waste no more breath. If he loves it, point him to Curt and Kal.

I've turned a few people onto the CRT life. They had no idea before seeing my setup either. A few folks now have there own setups, for some it was too much effort. Either way at least we all know the truth. CRT's rule, dell SUCKS Twisted Evil

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 6:32 pm Post subject:

Hey, at least it's not an Insignia 27" set with an Insigna HTIAB. Smile

rabies_70 · Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 6:34 pm Post subject:

That was my first taste of home cinema

stefuel · Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 12:05 am Post subject:

The first CRT projector I ever saw was a AmPro 3600 set up in a dealer showroom showing Top Gun. It was via Laser disc through a Faroudja VP 400. I think I filled the cup Wink

BRIANJOHNSON · Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 92

The problem is as soon as you try to show anyone, they take one look at the ceiling and say holy cow look at that thing. You know this plug and play world we live in. my boss at work bought a new hd lcd tv. then pluged in into the cable box with a s-video cable.

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

Maybe things would improve if we spent more time helping people out and showing them what real HT can be like, rather than sitting around on a forum mocking them for not instinctively knowing about black levels and grayscale tracking... Rolling Eyes

Tinman · Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 2:31 am Post subject:

schmoe · Joined: 30 Mar 2008 Posts: 374 Location: Seattle, WA

and therein lies the rub. for most people plug-and-play > grayscale-tracking. to each his own.

Elaine Benes · Joined: 25 Apr 2006 Posts: 1416

I've been enjoying CRT projectors for 10 years now, they are way fun, for sure, but the thing I've seen over the years that has brought people TO CRT is the same thing that is now driving them away.

It is ONLY price.

Nothing else really has any major influence on the un-initiated.

When I started in this great hobby, you could buy a discarded CRT projector from ebay for a couple hundred bucks with some luck, you could always get them from the mass computer recyclers for a couple hundred bucks, and if you wanted to drive to Florida, you could buy them from the space program's surplus auctions for a couple hundred bucks. Way back, there were few, if any professional resellers, NO hobby resellers, and the guy buying from the auctions was the end user. What this meant was END USERS were getting a smoking deal on projectors. For a few hundred bucks, you were walking out with a HUGE GREAT projector. Sure there was risk, but there was LOTS of reward too...

Digitals were very expensive, you were looking at $10,000. for a crappy digital back then, so there evolved a growing market of hobby resellers(mostly greedy flippers, actually) and some professional resellers who took their windfalls and turned them out to the growing market of Home Theater enthusiasts. Since digitals were so expensive, and crt projectors were still seen as a "valid" projection technology, there were lots of newbies to buy the "couple of hundred bucks" projectors from the flippers for $1000.- $2500. and from the "pro" resellers for a LOT more, and still not come close to the cost of new digitals, not to mention the digitals looked like crap...

Then came the X1 from Infocus.

It was the first digital projector with an "ok" image that you could buy BRAND NEW for under $2000., often for closer to $1000. !!!

Sure it looked like crap compared to a 9" LC projector, but the flippers and pro re-seller's had driven the prices of 9" LC's to the point where they were MORE than brand new high end digitals, even though they were used !!!
So with the X1, lots of "newbies" were now looking at digital again, instead of good old used crt...

Thank a combination of greed and lowering costs on digitals...

Now, you can buy a 1080p digital for less than even a now much cheaper 9"LC projector, and let me tell you, the image is EVERYTHING a crt projector's is, *except* for absolute black. Plus, the newest 1080p digitals are BETTER than crt in lots of aspects like geometry*(perfect), gamma(infinitely adjustable, and not subject to the non-linear odd gamma ramp of crt tubes) and focus(absolutely perfect over the whole screen even the farthest corners...).

So what reason does the initiate have to come to crt ? None.

If we want more crt fans, the prices have to get BACK to where they were at the beginning, low, low, low...its the only way to get the people in.

As more flippers get out, and the number of pro re-sellers drops, that will be good for the true crt enthusiast, as it will mean more projectors will get to the end users without the huge markups that have driven the newbies out to buy digitals...

To the OP, your workmate isn't "less of a man" or anything for having a digital, he's just a normal guy who wants the biggest tv he can get for the least amount of money. If you could show him as big and as good(or better)a picture from a crt projector and the cost was significantly less than the $700. he spent on his Dell projector, you'd easily convert him...but if he's got to shell out significantly more for a dead technology and only a slightly different, perhaps better image...he'll only laugh...

donaldk · Joined: 17 Jun 2008 Posts: 308

Yup, we aren't called bottomfeeders for nothing on the other forum;-). Unfortunately one has to go all the way across the pond and the North-American continent to have a small item checked-out and repaired*, with shipping and customs this is only feasible in case of the expensive 9"-ers. Which are again getting more affordable, overhere (Holland) a 1209s recently went for 1500,- euro, a 1292 was 1000+, don't remember how much over. 909s are now down to 5K euro.

* Well if you have a very special high-end project Reinier might be tempted once or twice a year, Rob got out of CRT completely and sold his parts to Jan in Belgium who also tackles high-end machines, at reseller prices, to see them flipped on ebay two days later the buyer asking three times his price;-).

km987654 · Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 6:16 am Post subject:

Any person in any market for any product could pay way too much if they are not initiated this is not a CRT projector phenomenon. My first real contact with CRT projectors was back in 1984 when I worked with a guy that owned several very large video stores. He had one in the corner playing a movie. The projector was a Sony KPxxxx with the pull down mirror and curved 6ft screen attached to the back. I used to go to auctions for this guy all the time and see people pay way more than new price for a second hand auctioned item. There were also resellers at these auctions and they would of course put a markup on the item and retail it. Like most things though if you know what you should be paying you can avoid the flippers.

On the projector I had to have one of those Sony PJs and eventually got one off my video mate in about 1989. It had a bad green tube and it stayed that way for 12 years because I just could not get one. My wife used to refer to it as the satellite dish to any of her friends and friends who saw it used to say it was out of focus and had odd colours but all including my wife would not watch a normal TV and would want the satellite dish on and remember it had no green tube. Its gone now and even though I work with all sorts of digitals all day I would not use one in my HT.