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Epson 1080 UB unboxing

Allow me to geek out a bit here and share some of my excitement on receiving my new projector!

The Epson 1080 UB was announced at CEDIA expo 2007 in September, and then again at CES 2008. It has made a brief appearance on the epson.ca website, and seems to have disappeared again. Mine arrived today from Quebec Acoustic – ending the long two weeks we had a dedicated home theater with no projector in it.

Without further delay, here is the unboxing of the Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 UB.

Much, much smaller than my CRT projector – a scant 20lb shipping weight.

Note the use of folded cardboard as a packing material. The box was well packed.

Not much in the way of accessories. Power cord, manuals, and a remote.

A foam yellow band holds the lens in place for shipping.

The back panel with the various connection options.

Initial impression of the physical unit. While I did consider the “Pro” version which comes in black, it wasn’t worth the $1000 premium you pay. The Home and Pro versions are effectively the same core unit, so the performance should be identical The white with silver accent actually looks pretty nice in person. The projector is only 12.3lb (5.6kg), but takes up a bit more space than I expected.

Viewing impressions are certain to follow.

Retro Computing

I’m a second generation programmer, which is a bit odd given my age, but my Dad was one of the types who bought the kit and built his first computer. So even as a very young child I had access to computer systems, but it wasn’t until I was in high school that the light went on and I “got it”.

The first system I got to spend any time programming on was a TI-99/4A – not having a tape drive, my Dad and I would hack up a game in basic over a weekend and just leave the thing on. I remember losing hours of work to the reset key combo (right shift + one of the number keys, left shift got you the symbol you wanted.. duh).

My first computer was the Commodore 64 – it was ~$700 of my own hard earned money for the main CPU + floppy drive. This is the machine I learned assembly language on. Being a pack rat, I’ve still got it rotting in a box in the basement along with a big stack of 170k floppies.

Knowing assembly opened the door to ‘demo’ programming, this mostly consisted of tight sequences exploiting the quirks in the video chip. We’d “borrow” the music from a game or another demo not having any music skills ourselves. Graphics were similarly lifted, or painfully hand-crafted. There were various groups I was part of, often the same folk in the group just under yet another cool sounding name.

One stuck out as particularly successful in my mind: Screaming Euphoria. I think we only made one actual demo release as this group – and sadly I had misplaced the demo (or re-used the diskette for something else) and thought it was lost in time. Enter the internet – and thanks to folk who are much bigger C64 fanatics than I am, you can download the “Disconnect” farewell demo, and get an emulator (I used VICE) to view it.

Pretty cool for a little 8bit machine. Amazing what could be accomplished with so little. Frightening how many cycles we waste today. I’m glad to have found a bit of my programming past again, maybe I can finally ditch that C64 in my basement.

“So, you’re buying another one…right?”

This was a common response from good friends of mine who were reacting to my statement “I sold my projector”. I suppose that the reaction would have been different and I said “I’m buying a new projector”, but I wasn’t.. until now.

In my Ampro Resource blog, I documented my 2nd CRT projector (my 1st being an Electrohome ECP 4100). Back in 2003 I had the upgrade bug and went from the 7″ air coupled ECP to the 9″ liquid coupled Ampro.

Early in 2005, I was finally getting to the final stages of finishing our basement – and was about to become a Dad. The idea of hoisting the 165lb Ampro onto the ceiling and the general care and maintenance of the CRT projector seemed like it was going to be more work than I was willing to put into the hobby. At the time, the Panasonic AE700 was my ‘choice’ projector. I narrowly avoided buying one, only dissuaded after seeing one in sub-optimal conditions at a local store. For the price, the image quality was far below what I had with my non-tweaked CRT.

At the end of 2007, the upgrade bug was back. I have less and less time to tinker with home theater stuff and 1080p projectors have dipped to the sub $3k price point.

Short version of the story: I’ve placed my order for the brand new Epson 1080UB – and am now playing the waiting game. Oh yeah, and the reason I sold my CRT before buying a new one – was to make sure I couldn’t back out at the last minute.. again.

Details on my buying decision etc, follow..

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