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Re: Cutting Costs in Retirement
Old 07-09-2004, 10:08 AM   #41
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Re: Cutting Costs in Retirement

13 to 15 feet should give you 100" diagonal in 4:3 with the average infocus consumer home theater proj like an x1. Other projectors may vary in image size.

Infocus has a calculator, just go to their site, click down onto a home projector and look for the link to calculate image size and distance.

I've fiddled with paint and screen materials, but honestly just throwing it on a textured white wall (medium orangepeel) looks fine with no fuss.

Supposedly Sony has a new screen material that rejects white light but accepts red/green/blue with improved gain. Unfortunately they're looking at $500 for a regular size screen and I didnt pay much more than that for my x1. If you want to get a good pic during the day without blacking out your windows, look for a model with higher lumens, at least 1500 and preferably 2000+. Avoid anything with low contrast ratios, look for 2000 and up. Some presentation projectors pretending to be home theater projectors have far lower contrast ratios and you'll have to crank up the brightness to see whats going on in dark scenes. Then get blasted by daylight scenes.

Given that for $750 plus a few doodads you get a better picture than a $3000 big screen, and it takes up a lot less space, I'm still very happy with the x1. Which has been replaced and I think a lot of the experts are still favoring the x1 vs its replacement (I think its the 4800 or 4805?). The one benefit the new one has is "native" 16:9 projection. I think that matters a lot more to purists than to mooks like me that just want a big cheap picture.
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Re: Cutting Costs in Retirement
Old 07-19-2004, 12:48 PM   #42
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Re: Cutting Costs in Retirement

Quote:
I use www.onesuite.com which is 2.9 cents per minute if you use the 1-800 number, or 2.5 cents per minute, I think, if you use a local access number.
Sure, give it a try - some people find it ok. I tried it about 1.5 years ago and was very disappointed. I had a lot of difficulty getting connected to the local dial number, I would have dropped calls, I would have calls made where I could hear the caller saying "Hello, hello, who's there?" but they couldn't hear me, and about 50% of the connected calls had poor audio quality.
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Re: Cutting Costs in Retirement
Old 07-19-2004, 12:59 PM   #43
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Re: Cutting Costs in Retirement

Those things happen to me too, but rarely. I find that if I call during peak times, I get a busy signal from the local number, or the number i'm calling rings busy when nobody is on the phone.

About 1 in 10 calls has an echo or low volume for the other person. My end sounds fine.

I'm thinking they're using voice over IP (voip) technology like vonage or packet8. Would explain the low cost and the occasional funny business.

But I do like being able to yap all I want all month for a typical cost of about eight bucks.
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