Link to All Projector Posts

I decided to try a new screen paint mix for my living room wall. Before I had painted a screen area in the middle of my yellow wall. I have been thinking and preparing for my next projector like always. The big difference between each generation of projector is the brightness of black. Every generation it gets a little bit blacker. My Optoma HD70 is a lot blacker than my Optoma H27 was and the next projector will be even blacker. There is a level where the blacks are black enough and you can start to enjoy truly black blacks as far as your eyes are able to perceive. Knowing that I decided to paint the whole wall to create an interesting projection effect which I will demonstrate below.

Also during this repaint I decided to change the mix a little bit. Before I just used Behr Silver Screen which is a normal favorite. This time I used a mixture of around 70% Behr Silver Screen and 30% Behr White Opal Pearlescent. The pearl paint adds an amazing shimmer to the image. It looks brighter with richer colors but it also looks like a plasma television. It has this glow to it like the light is coming from behind the wall. If you get close to the wall you can see all the micro reflectors doing their stuff but when you get back around 6 feet that disappears and it just looks great. I could probably go higher and might at some point. I will probably go paint, projector, paint, projector, back and forth. And now the examples.

Here is an example of normal HD footage. This is the maximum size of the projected image so there wouldn’t be any light grey blacks around it.

Now here a commercial. It is a standard definition commercial that is also letterboxed so on a widescreen display it shows up as a little image. With black blacks you don’t feel like you are watching a tiny image in the middle of a large screen because the surrounding black pixels are darker than you are able to perceive so the image is small but you don’t feel like it isn’t filling up the space. It just is the space.

These final images are much better than a commercial. Below are movies shown in their very wide aspect ratio. Once the blacks get black enough you start to see just the wide image like watching a movie in a theater instead of seeing dark grey bars at the top and bottom. This lack of grey bars make the wide movies seem larger instead of smaller which they actually are compared to HDTV sources.

This new paint mixture buys a little bit of time but during dark scenes the blacks are visible painting the dark grey bars above and below widescreen movies. The increased contrast of whatever my next projector will be in addition to the iris that is in most that brings the black levels down so only the minimum amount of light ever leaves the projector for ever frame shown so you never get the waste light visible in the room.

The set with even more pictures is on flickr if you would like to see the out-takes.

The paints used are Behr White Opal Pearlescent No. 751 and Silver Screen 770E-2 that is also called Silverscreen 770E-2

Here is an image of the screen surface up close with a flash to get an idea of the color and reflectivity. It is very neutral.

A short update on the home server because it isn’t to a finished point so there can’t be too much to tell.

The first thing I tried was creating a virtual hard drive and using iSCSI to connect it to my Mac Pro. There isn’t a native iSCSI client in Mac OS X so 3rd party solutions are the only option. They weren’t very stable and using a fixed volume size I lost a lot of the benefits.

The second thing was SMB transfer. This worked very well and was very stable but it used 100% of the server’s CPU which limited file transfers to 30-40 MB/sec reads and 20-30 MB/sec writes. If I got a faster CPU this would be just about right.

The third thing I tried was NFS transfer. This was great at reading files from the server and was able to go over 100 MB/sec approaching the limit of gigabit ethernet. (125 MB/sec) Write speed wasn’t so great. Sometimes it would be 30 MB/sec but after a while or if another write or read was started the speed would drop to around 4 MB/sec. NFS is probably the best if the Mac OS X to Solaris issues get sorted out. This solution also used around 20% of the server CPU so I had enough headroom to enable compression of the data on the server with no performance hit.

So for now I will go with the second method, SMB and upgrade the CPU to something with a few more cores and a higher clock speed.

Update: After some more tweaks I was able to get a little under 50 MB/sec for both reads and writes for most situations. Lots of tiny files still dropped to lower transfer speeds. The processor is still maxed out most of the time.

Update Again: Actually I may not have changed anything. Sometimes it just seems to go faster. I haven’t figured that out yet.

My current project in my spare time is to build one of these Sun x4500 servers for a normal price. It is a really exciting project. It is also the first complete build of a PC that I have ever done. I have taken a few PCs apart and upgraded parts and added things to them but my history with Macs has left me with a series of computers mostly built by Apple with core options.

I ordered did as much research as I thought I needed and ordered all the parts and really had a great time. I got a really efficient and low power AMD processor and a super great motherboard and case but I made an error in picking out my parts. The motherboard I picked out was super popular and full of wonderful reviews but it was also too new. I thought I was being pretty careful and I was but I underestimated the progress that had been recently made with Solaris. I think that if this had been a year from now the situation would have been fine but Solaris is still in the process of moving from a big slow OS to a more versatile and progressive OS.

So after I had a working PC build running Solaris and Spinrite but not network accessable, among other things, I am sending the motherboard back and will try again in a few days, maybe over the weekend.

If you have been in my kitchen in the past quarter of a year you have probably seen the wires and electrical components spread out on my kitchen table. Last night I decided to finish it a it took about 4 more hours of very slow soldering to finish a very fantastic amp. It is sort of an old style DIY HiFi. It uses a new type of amplifier and is super clean sounding with very high efficiency meaning small size and a low amount of heat. It also means it has loads of tiny pins to solder that are way too close to each other. I am very pleased with it and plan on building a nice box so I can take it off the towel. Also, I plan on making a much more powerful amp or maybe even a multi channel one. This entry is a little short, I think I am too excited. I will have to wait another day and fill this out.

Update: So now that I have spent some time with the amp, in its still bare board form. I am still very pleased with the easy sound of the amp. I don’t have any speakers with an efficiency high enough to really explore high end hifi like a nice pair of La Scala II’s. I will probably just build some simple Voight Pipes in my spare time and use those for my office speakers. That would be a weird adventure.

I am painting my wall right now with a couple coats of primer and then if that looks thick and smooth enough I am going to add on Behr Silver Screen paint (770E-2). It gets good reviews for a screen surface so I should like it. We will see.

This is a link to the new projector setup photo set where I will be adding pictures of my painting and the progress as it gets finished and as the projector goes up and I will add another post that is more complete when I get to a more final stage in the process. The stages are 1 choose a target size and prepare an area larger, I went with 3 inches on each side extra so I would have some room, 2 sand and primer the surface to smooth it out and get rid of the yellow, 3 paint plenty of grey on the area, 4 mount the projector and figure out the best size for the room and the projector, the larger the image the dimmer it will be but the blacker the blacks so a balance must be reached and 5 paint a black border around my final screen size to enhance contrast and improve the cinematic feel.

Stages of Projector Setup

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

You can see this image big to check out the surface detail. There are some little marks but it is very smooth overall. This picture below was taken when there were still a couple coats left for the wall.

Stage 4 So it took an extra day because Optoma changed the size of the screw holes. Lowes and Home Depot didn't have the screws I needed. Lowes had the area for the screws but the what I ended up with at home for sure weren't the right fit. Ace Hardware really came through. That place is nice. So after one awesome night of using the projector on the coffee table projecting an image about the size of my last setup, 92″. Because the projector was brighter than I imagined and because of the changes of the screen surface I think I could go really big. I might go ahead and fill up my whole painted space or I might go with my original estimate of around 110″ being the correct size. This image below is 107″, or pretty close to that. If it gets bigger my couch starts to be in the way and I already had to take the globe, chains and light bulb out of my ceiling fan. It hangs down just a little too low but any light fixture should work, probably just no fans.

If you click on this image it will link to the larger size.

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And this is an example of why I was hesitant to paint my walls. I don't think that some spackle or mud or whatever would be able to get it totally smooth. I sanded it to get the intense peaks out but this is some serious plaster warpage. My experience with the previous screen assures me that these won't really be noticeable unless the bathroom door is left open which happens sometimes.
Update: You can't see any of this stuff. It looks great.

Update: It is still all awesome.