Ampro Resource

If I haven’t said it enough: backups are good, but when backups fail trust in google! Through Googles cache, I’ve been able to retrieve almost all of the content from the old Ampro weblog. Since some of the layout of the website has changed, I’ll be making some revisions to the postings to fix links and the like. Also, I’ll get a better looking theme here real soon.

Theater news: The Ampro continues to tick along on the ceiling. I’ve got the screen installed – and I really need to do a full mechanical setup. However, the image looks so good as it is I’m not that motivated to fix it. I’ve decided to have a bit of a ‘guys night’ every other week and try to make some progress on the theater, there’s lots of stuff to do. Some will be on my setup, and some on a few friends of mine. Cables are first I think – my extended VGA cable got busted up (and fixed) in the theater shuffle, so it needs replacing.

We had our first movie showing in the new theater room – what’s it been? 8 months without a real theater setup!? What a big treat it was when we got to sit down and see a movie the way its supposed to be seen.

The Incredibles was a great movie, and even with a really rough image setup and almost no audio setup (other than to plug everything together) it was an awesome experience.

Of course, there is lots more work to do on the home theater (like mount the screen since I was just using a primer white wall to shoot the image on) – but its starting to feel like the wait has been worth it. I’m glad I didn’t sell the CRT 🙂

After a frenzy of painting the ceiling and getting things ready to mount the projector, it’s finally up.

With the help of 4 friends to brute force it into position it was quick work to get it up. Not having the factory mount I created one from Unistrut. There is very little worry that it will ever fall down with six 5″ lag bolts into the joists above. I’m working on finishing up a whitepaper of sorts on unistrut mounts and will post that later. [edit: the DIY guide is here in the file section]
You’ll notice the bottom (now it’s the part towards the ceiling) is black. This is Tremclad rust paint, flat black — applied with a brush! It turned out much better than I thought it would, the paint seems to level itself out and finish very smooth. Later I’ll finish the rest, I think it will look really sharp.

Well, after visiting one of the local AV stores to check out the Panasonic AE700 and a few other LCD units, I have returned to my senses.

A friend of mine has a Sanyo Z2, and I’ve even seen in in an A/B comparison with my CRT. The screendoor effect really, really bugged me – but softening the focus on the LCD helped that to an acceptable level with no real apparent loss of detail (from DVD mind you, which is being scaled up) — an HD feed would probably look overly soft.

I’d have to say that the Sanyo Z2 really impressed me. I still may end up with one. However, after seeing the current ‘state of the art’ on display I’m disappointed. I don’t think I would be happy in my price range with what is availble now – so I’m going to stick with the CRT for a bit longer.