Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

We've been a projector household for a decade - started with a A$1000 short-throw, then upgraded to a A$1500 long-throw 4y ago after moving to an apartment where the layout didn't lend itself to short-throw, and I also needed bluetooth (audio) cast.

For anyone happy with up to 1080 (prices go a bit silly above 1080, at least in AU) and substantially less-than-vanta-black blacks, but appreciate viewing size (about 2 metre diagonal for us) and not having furniture obviously / perversely oriented around a rectangle that's almost always blank, it's an absolute boon.

Plug it into your RPi, NUC, etc - where the OS / UI 'smartness' is at your discretion - job done.

View on HN

Same here. We can live without the extra pixels. Space is the barrier though. We have a huge old cowshed that the previous owner turned into a snooker room, and we turned into a library with remote control screen. Makes watching a film more of an event. Nice playing games at “life size” scales too. We’ve been through three projectors in 15 years at ~£350 each.

> Makes watching a film more of an event.

Very much this is a big part of it too, for us - we're not 'TV in the background' people.

The (very) few people I know who are find the idea of a projector-only infeasible. For us it's just another feature of the arrangement.

Interesting! The preferences in this thread very closely match those of ours. Irrelevance to the number of pixels and blackness of black, making it more of an event, having big picture (ours is about 3m diagonal, can't help but sometimes brag to people that my setup is 110"). For me it matters that it's also not a colossal piece of furniture, but a small piece of equipment, tucked near the ceiling and thus usually out of the view.

It sounds like a well defined niche. I wish it was a bit less of that, so that I could upgrade to a bit less noisy, with a bit brighter picture, at a lower price point than what they seem to be going for here in Northern Europe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com