Optoma EP719 DLP Projector

We bought this projector with the intention of making a home theatre experience. We project it directly onto the wall of our living room and get a picture of about 100 inches diagonal from about 4 m away. This configuration only works at night because during the day there is too much ambient light leaking though our venetian blinds. However at night it really feals like our own personal cinema. So we have a 19in monitor sitting on our coffee table and a wireless keyboard and mouse for operation during the day. This allows us to surf the web and use the computer like a compute when we're not watching TV or a movie. We also combined this setup with a TV tuner card that works well with media center.

Before we got a surround sound system we were using the speakers in the projector. That worked quite well, at least as well as your standard daggy TV. We bought a surround sound system though because that delivers significantly better sound.

We don't notice the sound of the projector because it is very quite. We only futzed around with the projector interface when we got it and it was fairly straght forward. Now all we do is turn it on and off which is simple using a button on top of the device.

So far we don't a have dual head video card which presumably would allow us to both surf the web and watch TV at the same time.

Overall we've been very pleased with this projector and think combined with a 19' monitor it makes, for us, a much better choise than a large LCD TV. Being restricted to watching movies at night for us is not neccessarily a negative.

The problem I mentioned in the cons where the device looses sync and starts scanning inputs occurs when the resolution is set to 1280x1024 and we do something like minimise a full screen window (e.g. media center). The device scans all its inputs and find the VGA input again. It is just a little irritating and may not occur when using the DVI-D input.