Make Your Own TV To A 175" Cinema for Less Than $20 "Is This Legit"

I used to work at a high-end home theater store here in NY. I haven't seen the product, but just from it's description I can tell you why it's going to suck.

-Even good projectors with expensive, powerful light-bulbs are at a disadvantage to any type of rear projection set when in a well lit room sunlight or artificial. This thing is relying on the output power of the television itself to display the image on your wall. Maybe you'll see the picture okay in total dark (no daylight viewing please) I'm guessing that you do so much as turn on a small lamp, the picture will fade tremendously.

-As has already been mentioned earlier, you're using the tv as your projector, pointing towards your viewing surface (a clear white wall.) Where the hell are you going to put it? Sitting in the middle of the floor, facing away from your couch? Bolted to the ceiling? With some weird triangular black cardboard thing sticking to the front? Furthermore, it's highly unlikely that you'll be able to correct the geometry of the picture once you're set up. If it's on the floor pointed up or to the side pointing to the center of the wall, the geometry of the projected picture will be all screwed up, looking like a weird trapezoid instead of a nice rectangle.

-Since this is just a ghetto-fied blowup of the picture you're already looking at, it's basically taking the quality of whatver picture you're getting out of your tv now, and making it worse. On a side note, I've installed my share of high-def plasmas and projectors, and regular broadcast cable (without line doubling) looks like CRAP, even on the nice pricy models. You take VCR tapes and regular broadcast def stuff and make it larger, it looks even crappier. The only way it might look good is if you already have a high-def set, but why the hell would you spend the $$ on a high-def set playing high-def material and put a $15 cardboard thingy on the front and put it in the middle of your living room floor with it's butt pointed towards you.


If you want to try an experiment with your small tv in your bedroom, playing video games with the all the lights out, this could be a fun try. Using this on your main tv in the living room for watching movies and normal daytime tv, no way.