Epson Refurbished Projectors

I made the switch from CRT projection technology to a modern digital projector back in 2008 when I bought the Epson 1080UB. At the time, there was a lot of criticism of the new-ish digital projectors and their black levels, but the ease of use, reduced maintenance and price were attractive. I’ll likely write up an exit review of the 1080UB, but it lasted a long time and was a great projector until recently.

Near the end of May this year one of my friends had some projector woes and was looking for a replacement. There are a lot of choices out there and he first picked the Hisense PL2, but upon getting it and trying it out – it didn’t meet his needs. He then considered the Epson 3200 or the Epson 3800, the choice between these seems difficult and the street price was close. While he was mulling this decision over, I spotted an Epson 4010 as a refurb on amazon for only $1600 – and he jumped at this deal. He reported that the refurb arrived in perfect shape and that it was an amazing upgrade.

At the time I wasn’t looking to change things up, but the Epson 4010 ticked a lot of boxes for my next projector list. It wasn’t the UB range, and it still used a traditional lamp – but this refurb was great value for money.

A few week later I saw the Epson 5050UB as a refurb deal for under $3000, certainly tempting but while my 1080UB was giving me some trouble it was still kicking along. This 5050UB deal soon disappeared like any good deal, and that door closed.

Maybe a week after that, I start of have more frequent (daily) issues with the 1080UB and from a WAF it was time to get a new one. I started my hunt. A dream projector would be the Epson LS11000 which with the right deals lands in around $5000. At this price I start looking at the high end JVC and Sony offerings too. As mentioned a good deal on a current model UB projector would be nice too.

One constraint I need to work within, is where my projector is mounted. It’s on the ceiling, about 16′ from the screen – which is a 92″ diagonal (80″x45″). One day I may bump the screen size up a little, but size limitations are things like: room size, speaker placement, and brightness levels (larger screen, less intensity). In any case, this long throw was designed around the 1080UB which has a 2.1x zoom allowing for this placement. Great options like the Epson 3800 only have 1.62x zoom, forcing a much closer mounting to the screen.

Around this time I discover the official Epson refurb store – at the time it listed both the 4010 and 4050 at under $2k. The Epson 4010 is considered the consumer version, and the 4050 a custom installer version. The 4010 is white and you might see it for sale in the local big box store, The 4050 is black and comes with a few extras – but you’ll likely only get it via a boutique AV store that does whole theater builds outs, oh and it also has a 3yr warranty vs a 2yr warranty.  Other than these minor differences, the projectors are twins – totally identical performance.

While the 4050 was $130.01 more expensive than the 4010, I couldn’t resist the black exterior – and the idea that this would make my theater seem more like a custom install. It’s hard to figure out the actual street price for the 4050 as the Epson site just points you at places that will sell it to you (again, custom installers). You can find a price for the 4010 which is $3299.00, and if we assume the 4050 is a bit higher, the refurbished price is a nice discount.

I will share that I did find some debate over the quality and overall experience of ordering via the Epson refurb store. The website does list a return policy, but it is unclear if that is exchange only for refurbished units.

Still, given my requirements and the discounted price, this still seemed like a good choice. Fingers crossed I waited for the new to me projector to ship.

A day later, my credit card company flagged the attempt to charge my card from Epson as suspicious. Fair. However, very frustrating because while I did indicate to the credit card company I was good with the purchase, apparently the only thing to do is ask the merchant to try again? When I called Epson later (and it was quick to get to a live person) they seemed to not have any problem at their end with my payment, but they also had no idea about the decline. I was forced to just patiently wait to see if this all worked out.

It did. I got a shipping notice from Epson and a Purolator tracking number, checking my credit card online showed that I had been charged. Overall from when I made the web order to it arriving on my doorstep was 8 days, not bad.

It arrived in a large box, clearly marked as a renewed product.

While I knew the dimensions (19 cm x 52 cm x 45 cm), seeing the unit in person was a little surprising. That large box was mostly taken up by a large projector. It was well packed and protected.

I will post up more details on my new projector in a later post, but the unit that arrived was pristine. Not a mark. There are a few stickers added to the projector to indicate it’s renewed status but this is very much a new in box feeling. Unlike a full retail price version of the 4050, there was no extra lamp nor mount included (no surprise here). The remote was included (with batteries), a power cord, and a few cable locking clips. At this point, the extra $130 got me a black exterior and an extra year of warranty. Worth it? Absolutely.

Archiving Floppies

I’m slowly getting to clearing out some of the old office stuff at home, and yes, I appear to still have some 3.5″ floppies. I did in fact have a 3.5″ floppy drive, but it was in an old husk of a former PC. My desktop machine has a modern power supply and didn’t even have the right power connector to hook up the drive (easy fix with an adapter) – at least the motherboard still had the right connector to hook up the data cable.

I then had to do the right BIOS dance to actually enable the device, once this was done I could see it under Linux as /dev/fd0. Unfortunately the handful of disks I tried to mount gave errors, it seemed either this drive is faulty or all of my disks are expired. Now, these are floppies from the early 90’s – which is oh my 35 years ago!

Time to bust out ddrescue, and see if I can image any of these disks to pull data. Sadly my initial attempts were not great – I wasn’t getting much data off of these at all. Maybe this is a huge waste of time. I found the useful seeming ddrescueview which gives me a way to look at the status of the rescue attempt.

Let’s cover the basics. My initial attempts looked like

This worked, but I got a lot of errors. Adding the -d flag seemed to help a lot, but later I found out that I needed more flags to make this right.

I found a useful wikipage entry from the archiveteam specific to recovering floppies.

Here is the ddrescueview visualization of my initial attempt:

So not great. Next up is when I added the -d flag

Better. Of course as I decided to make sure this was repeatable, I tried removing the -d flag and running it again to make sure it was really bad. This time I got a completely clean read (fully green). There were 2 errors reported, but it retried and it was good?

So I start trying various combinations to see if I’m getting repeatable results. Overall it’s random errors and no clean reads again.

Now the clever thing that ddrescue does, is maintain a map file. This captures what was done, and allows you to run another pass to try to have more luck. This is what I need. Referencing the archiveteam advice I landed on this as the right combination

Let’s break down the flags

  • -d : direct access
  • -b512 : sector size of 512 bytes, important for direct access
  • -r 3 : retry errors 3 times
  • –retrim : allows us to re-run, and re-try failed blocks in the map

Using this magic, I was able to run the command a second time and get a clean read! So you can either be lucky, or use the map file and try a few times with the right settings.

Now I can mount the image under linux

This particular floppy apparently contained a few rescue tools (NDD.exe ring any bells) Well, glad I got those bits back – guess I’ll toss it on the pile and move on to the next one.

Now that I have things sorted out – I’m finding a couple that read clean, which is pretty cool given the files are from 1991. Amazing how little fits on these floppies, when it used to seem like so much.

I did manage to ‘crash’ the floppy drive with bad disks or something, because it would get into a state that rebooting the machine would not fix. Powering it off for a minute or two and a full cold boot seemed to get things back on track. When it was busted I’d get errors like:

I did run into more problems just like this and I really don’t understand what was wrong, or how to get it to behave again. Very frustrating. I just had to keep trying cold boots and different floppies. Looking at dmesg I see:

I picked up a used USB floppy drive locally, it was only $15 and it gave me a secondary device to try some of these floppies with — and I was hitting my head against the wall with the errors above.

The USB floppy appears on my system as a drive /dev/sdc – but I can just use that device in place of /dev/fd0 and the same commands work. Hopefully resetting the state will be easier as I can just unplug the USB drive and try it again. We’ll see if it gets into a similar busted state (which appears to be triggered by bad reads). So far it seems much more stable overall and I’m working my way through my old floppies.

The USB floppy drive worked really well. It is starting to seem like that old 3.5 floppy drive I installed in my machine was maybe not so stable. Some floppies that had many errors, read just fine with the USB floppy drive.

To speed things up, I adopted a two phased approach. Trying an optimistic version which would fail out quickly – followed by the more aggressive 3 retry version above if I determined I wanted to get as much data as possible. This is the quick version:

As a bonus for anyone who’s hung on this far into the post, let me share some of the output you get from the ddrescue tool showing the progress it makes:

You can see above, that it did in fact get to 100%, but slowly and required a secondary run to finish.

This was certainly a trip down memory lane, I’m glad I persisted in trying to read the data. There were a few files I wanted to keep out of the pile of floppies, and now I’ve got the archived with my other files to keep.

Algorithmic Pricing – Bad for Everyone

There is so much promise that technology has, but it feels like we’ve taken the wrong turns somewhere along the line and now we’re in a very weird place. While this post will focus on ancestry.ca – the intent is to comment on the wider problem, not this particular website.

From a family tree / genealogy point of view – having computer access to mountains of data makes searching for information so much easier than it used to be. Now, there is also something satisfying about traveling to a given location and finding the original paper records, or walking an old graveyard and finding tombstones that tell a story about the people who lived in that community. Ideally you want to combine all of these approaches to have a rich experience about exploring a family history.

While you can use ancestry.ca for free, the real value is access to the trove of data they have available. To get access you pay a monthly fee – and this is fair – running a website (even this one) isn’t free. But what do you charge people? It’s pretty variable, it depends on some fix costs – but there are many other variable costs, and coming up with a fair number is hard.

Of course with marketing you also want to set a fixed price, but offer deals to encourage customers to make the leap from fee to paying. Here is where I struggle with the approach when those discounts move around dynamically.

A gift membership seems like a great way to get someone started. However, this is what you get if you want to go down that path

Two plans, and either 6 or 12 months.

Contrast this with what just subscribing offers you

Ok, well – there is a lower plan that is significantly cheaper if we consider a 12 month plan. So maybe a good gift is that “All Canadian Records” version. That was my plan – and so I printed out the website page and said – hey, here you are I will gift you the 12 month lowest tier plan.

Then weirdness started. The first attempt to take the logged in ancestry account and subscribe landed at a page that offered up a different price.

Wait, what? Where did my 12 month option go? This is not nearly as good a deal. Let’s grab another computer and visit the site to see what’s going on.

Great, now we only see a monthly price? No more multi-month discounts?

Of course, the next thing I do is start trying different browsers. I get a variety of the 3 possible choices all captured above. However, I’m still struggling to figure out how do I purchase the right “cheap” one of $119.88 / year?

In the end, I kept creating new incognito windows in Chrome until I got the right price. This actually took a bit of trying as mostly I was getting only the 6 month option. Once I got the right price I clicked on the “Become a Member” button, and signed in on that window. As I worked through the credit card payment page, it seemed – yes, I was paying for the right $119.88 price – my total was +tax, and it went through on my credit card at that price. Problem solved.

This does make me wonder, how would a normal person do this? A gift membership would push people to a higher level plan (and extra $60/year). If they got only the monthly cost ($14.99) that stacks up to an $60.11/year. The 6-month plan is an extra $20.10/year. From a yearly price point – the cheapest gift membership is 50% more expensive; monthly payments also work out to 50% more expensive, and the 6-month option is 17% more expensive.

Just like casinos, the house always wins with algorithmic pricing. This type of pricing makes me less (and likely many others) less likely to actually buy things from companies that do this. I value the service they are providing, but I want to pay a fair price – not one that is a roll of the dice.