Home Theater Geeks 479 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
In this episode of Home Theater Geeks, I talk about the Screening Room's 2025 Projector Shootout with a number of people who were deeply involved, so stay tuned.

00:14 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Podcasts you love.

00:16 - Kris Deering (Guest)
From people you trust.

00:18 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
This is TWIT hey there, scott wilkinson, here, the home theater geek. In this episode we're going to be talking about a projector shootout which was put on by the screening roomcom and they held a shootout with 4K projectors and it was held in Colorado Springs, colorado, on April 5th and 6th 2025. I have a number of guests to talk about it today. First up is John Schuerman, who is the owner of the Screening Room AV.

01:05 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Hey, john, welcome back to the show. Hi, Scott, it's good to see you. As I was mentioning earlier, I think the last in-depth conversation we had was on aspect ratios. It was a lot of fun. I'm glad to be back, yeah.

01:17 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I'm glad to have you back here too. Next up is Steve Crabb, who is in the sales and marketing end of the Screening Room AV and a system designer. Hey, Steve, welcome to the show.

01:30 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Hey Scott, Thanks for having us Long time listener, first time guest.

01:36 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
And happy to have you here. Absolutely Okay. Next up, we have two calibrators who were involved in the shootout. Okay, next up, we have two calibrators who were involved in the shootout. First of all, Chris Deering, owner of Deep Dive AV and an AVS forum legend. I would not hesitate to say, hey, Chris, how you doing?

01:57 - Kris Deering (Guest)
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me over. Also a former co worker of yours, if I remember right.

02:02 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Oh, that's true, we both worked at Sound and Vision, maybe, or the home theater yeah, probably several. You wrote, you wrote and still write, I think, reviews of projectors and other AV products, so you got some deep experience here. So I'm glad to have you here. Thanks, scott. And finally we have Sammy Prescott Jr, who is an ISF Level 3 calibrator with 15 years experience and a reviewer at ProjectorCentralcom. Hey, sammy, welcome to the show.

02:39 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Thanks for having me. I appreciate being able to join you bet I'm sure glad you're here too.

02:47 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Okay, so let me start with john. Uh, what was the general idea behind this shootout?

02:54 - John Schuermann (Guest)
the general idea, with all of our shootouts, is trying to set up a, a legit level playing field comparison where we try to take all the variables out of play, show each product at its best and let people make up their own minds. Try to remove as much bias and as much marketing. We try to remove that kind of marketing spin that all the manufacturers give, which we understand.

03:20 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Sure, all manufacturers do it. They, you know they do marketing hype, it's their job.

03:26 - John Schuermann (Guest)
And nobody, and all of them are all happy to say that they make the best of everything. And of course, you know, in some cases products are roughly equivalent, and so what we did with this one here was trying to see how much, how well these projectors at various price points did against each other with various types of content, and again as unbiased and as level and as controlled as we could make it.

03:54 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Steve, I learned that this particular shootout was not, as many are graded. So you know there wasn't a winner, there wasn't one with the highest score, and then the next highest score, and so on, right.

04:09 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that we always try to do, which is be very fair, very objective, look at measurements and be as completely, you know, transparent as we can with the results of what we saw in the shootout transparent as we can with the results of of what we saw in the shootout.

04:29 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
But one could, uh, do that and still have a score. I mean, all the judges, whoever they were, could say, well, this one gets a 9.5, you know like figure skating or something like that. But you guys don't do that yeah, that's very true.

04:39 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
I mean, uh, you know, if you look at some of the groups and forums, you'll see, you know, massive hyperbole. This is the best thing ever and this is the worst thing ever. And why would anybody want this? And we really try to remove all that and avoid it as much as possible and be as fair as we can, and so we'll point out if one product maybe falls a little short in one area, but we'll point out it's, you know, it's objective superiority in another department maybe. So that's what we've always tried to do.

05:09 - John Schuermann (Guest)
And if I can just jump in real quick too, sometimes when we do our speaker shootouts we do do that scoring one to 10 because those are double blind. But in this one people were aware what they were looking at. It's just too hard to hide all those projectors and switch them, so we didn't think scoring was fair and we also. This time we wanted to contextualize, just like Steve was talking about. Maybe this projector is better for this application and this one's better for that application. And if you're just doing a strict scoring thing sometimes you can lose that context.

05:40 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Good point, like one of them might be better in a dark room and one might be better in a brighter room.

05:46 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Absolutely Depends on the application and how it's going to be used, and so we tried to, like Steve said, bring all the hyperbole out of it and this is the king of this and that. And this is not to knock those types of things, because we've done them as well, but in this case we just thought it was very important to contextualize performance of each projector.

06:05 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Mm hmm, but in this case we just thought it was very important to contextualize performance of each projector. Well, let's go over the contestants, if you will. Not that there's a winner here per se, but these are the projectors that were in the shootout and were shown to people. We have a graphic that kind of shows them side by side. Chris, why don't you tell us when we see that? Give us a little idea of what the list is here.

06:32 - Kris Deering (Guest)
Yeah, so for this event we ended up with two screens. We used some StudioTek 100, 140-inch diagonal 16x9 screen, so we wanted to make sure that the screen wasn't contributing anything to the image. It's a great screen, but not one that I would recommend in very many rooms because of what it is, but it's probably the most transparent screen that there is out there in terms of not adding anything to the image at all. Exactly.

07:05 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I want to make sure everybody understands when you say transparent, you don't mean you can see through it.

07:12 - Kris Deering (Guest)
No, it's just a. It doesn't have a. It's a, uh, lamberian screen. There's no gain, there's no, you know, there's really not anything to it. It has a very slight amount of texture to it, um, but you would really have to go out of your way to see it. Um so um, and then we divided it into groups, so we basically had two main groups and we categorized them kind of based on their price points.

07:40 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
So, as we can see here, we've got two that are over $25,000. Correct and three that are under $10,000.

07:49 - Kris Deering (Guest)
Correct, correct.

07:58
So we did the Epson QB1000, which was the most expensive of the first group, that was the more budget-minded Again, I always say that because everybody's budget is different but we just felt like it was probably the one that would make the most sense, being compared to the other models. Then we used the JVC's entry-level model, which is the NZ500. And then, out of request from a lot of the buzz that was going on and the screening room being a dealer, we brought in the Valerian VisionMaster Pro 2, which is a lot different than the other projectors here. It's more of a what I would call a lifestyle projector over a dedicated home theater projector. It's a portable unit with a speaker built into it and everything. But you know, if you look at the specs and like what the market is that they're going after, it felt like it would be a good fit for that um to, so that people could kind of see like, hey, this is getting a lot of buzz, how does it compare to some of these other ones that are, you know, more like an entry level?

08:55 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Sure, and it's the only one that's based on DLP technology Correct, whereas the rest of them are either L-COS liquid crystal on silicon, or 3LCD, which Epson uses.

09:10 - Kris Deering (Guest)
Yeah, it would have been great to have, you know, maybe another DLP in the mix, but there hasn't really been anything you know that I'm aware of. That's been like a big entry into the market as of recently. I mean, we could have even done more projectors from these brands, but we kind of looked at like, well, how much time do we have, what do we want to show? And really, what did we show the last time? Because a lot of these projectors are just variants of things that we did a few years ago, with not a lot of real big changes to them. And then on the upper side, we had the opportunity to look at Sony's latest consumer flagship, the 8100, and then compare that to the JVC's flagship, the NZ900, which again are closer to each other in price than the other ones. So in that comparison we only had the two. In the first comparison we had the three.

10:08 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Well, we'll get to that in just a second. Sammy, you also had two other Epsons in a different room super bright, high brightness projectors, right.

10:20 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Correct. Yes, you had the QL7000, which is a 10,000 lumen projector. You had the QL3000, which is a 6,000 lumen projector, but additionally Epson also brought in the QS100 and that was there more so on demo, but the one that was projecting the image mainly in that room was the QL7000.

10:39 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Which is a almost $30,000 projector 10,000 lumens, correct, and that was put on a much bigger screen right.

10:48 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Yeah, I want to say that was a 180 inch diagonal screen. I also believe that was also a snow mat screen as well. It was a phantom. It was a phantom, okay. So that was a phantom. We used the snow map, um, and it was bright. I mean, that thing can throw a ton of light, um. I've had it here and tested it and it definitely shows a different application that you could use for those style of projectors it's meant for. You could use it for dark room, but you could also use it in a bright room, and they have the lights on in that room, in fact we have a photo from the event in that Epson room, graphic number two.

11:28 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
We can take a look at that and you can see that the image looks great and there's still plenty of light on in the room.

11:34 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Yeah, it was actually brighter in the room than that picture makes it looks like. I think was the exposure setting on how bright that screen was right, right.

11:42 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, taking a picture of projected images is not easy yeah, no, chris.

11:49 - John Schuermann (Guest)
chris, all of us are kind of against the idea we had a lot of people asking about are you going to live stream this? And there's all kinds of problems with that. The camera's biased things. You're evaluating a display on another display. We just did not want to do that, so the pictures we're sharing here, we always had that caveat. Please don't make critical judgments about picture quality from a picture that you're sitting here.

12:14 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Absolutely right, absolutely right. So here's a question, for anyone who cares to answer it, of the projectors in the main room, if we look at graphic one again, we will see. One of the things I put in that little table was the advertised peak light output, and we can see it goes from 2,000 to 3,400 lumens, so let's call it more or less roughly equivalent. The prices are anything but why such a?

12:51 - John Schuermann (Guest)
huge range in prices. Well, I think I can start out by saying that I mean JVC, using an example, jvc anybody who followed us from our last shootout and there's quite a few people who were interested in this one, who attended the last one or were aware of it JVC kind of dominated that original shootout and we wanted to see how the other manufacturers had kind of caught up, and we'll obviously talk about that in part two um and jvc. As you go up the line, you get more and more and more brightness and you also get the ability for more and more contrast and you get the ability for more and more or more color gamut coverage. So those are the differences. You go up epson, it becomes that brightness game, right.

13:30
As soon as you jump up that 30 000, you're you're looking at eye-bleeding brightness, and I don't mean that as a derogatory term, no, for the application it looks amazing, sure. And then on Sony, it's a similar thing. As you go up, you get greater brightness, you get better. Well, I'm going to ask Chris that one, or Sammy, the Sony lineup, once you get to the 6100 and 8100, I think, is roughly equivalent in terms of gamut and contrast. It's mainly a brightness difference. Is that right?

13:59 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Yeah, the only difference is that you get live color with the 8100, where you don't get it with the 6100. But outside of that, in terms of gamut coverage, you're basically just getting additional brightness.

14:12
What do you mean, Sammy Sammy, by live color so they have a feature in the 8100 that was also in the um 7000 as well, where it it basically skews I don't want to say excuse the um Gamut coverage, saturation as well as luminance. So if you turn this feature on, you're going to get a little bit more saturation and you're going to get a little bit more color, luminance, um, throughout the entire gamut. So think of it as like a color booster, for the lack of a better word. And that's only on the 8100 or bravia 9 or the 7000, in this case the 8100 right, we have to say that the sony has sort of changed its nomenclature a bit.

14:58 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
This, this 8100 that you saw, is in their new bravia projector line. They also have a new bravia tv line, yes, um, and the bravia 9 I. I don't recall whether they call it the bravia projector 9 or the bravia 9 projector. One of't recall whether they call it the Bravia Projector 9 or the Bravia 9 Projector. One of those to distinguish it from the Bravia 9 LCD QLED TV is in their new nomenclature.

15:24 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
And I think they also apply it to their soundbars as well.

15:27 - Kris Deering (Guest)
Right, yeah, chris, can you bring up the spreadsheet again and we can kind of go over. I think you're kind of addressing the disparity in prices versus the light output, correct? And I think a lot of people again on AV boards and stuff, they don't understand why you see these kind of discrepancies. So maybe it's a good time to kind of highlight it.

15:51
I would love it if you did. Yeah, so let's just start at the bottom of the list. So you had the Valerian at 3,000 lumens and $3,000. So I've seen this complaint from quite a few people that they're like well, how is it the DLPs can have, you know, 3,000 lumens at such low price points where if you're trying to get a 3000 lumen, say like a jvc or a sony, you know you're up into the 20 000 range? The the thing here is that, well, there's multiple things that kind of come to mind immediately. One is that it really comes down to the display technology. So dlp, you know, has been around in the market for a long time, developed by, by Texas Instruments. So that right there saves money. And the reason I say that is because any manufacturer Valerian, benq, barco, any brand that sells DLP projectors they're not developing these chips. So Texas Instruments is the one that's manufacturing these chips. Developing these chips, so Texas instrument is the one that's manufacturing these chips.

16:56
And a lot of times, a lot of these projectors are based on basically an OEM light engine, where you're, you're basically buying a kit and then you're taking. You know, they might change some things that have to do with some of the features here and there, or they build like a chassis around it and then put their own lenses on it. But if you think about the costs involved with, you know that technology. Ti has already developed the chip They've developed. You know how it works with the image processing chip, that it's driving it. All those costs are not there. You're just buying. You're saying, hey, I want this chip and you know this driver, and then that's it.

17:33 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
There are no development costs for the manufacturer.

17:43 - Kris Deering (Guest)
Exactly. And now that's scaled. Ti is making that same chip for a multitude of applications. So they're selling these chips in huge numbers. So Epson can also do kind of a scale, because they're pretty much the only manufacturer out there anymore that does anything with LCD and obviously LCD has been around for a long time. So now they're in the business of like okay, well, we can spread that cost over the fact that we sell to churches and schools and all these other things there's.

18:07
You know, again, those chips can be used in a lot of different applications, but they are the only ones making their projector. You know, like nobody's like OEMing their projector and putting a different label on it. Where in the DLP world you'll see a lot of projectors that's like oh wow, like that looks exactly the same as this other brand that has, you know, the same one. So it's again, they're buying an OEM and then kind of working on it. Right. Again they're buying an OEM and then kind of working on it. Right Now, dlp, when you start talking about the Sony and the JVC, you know they're making their own chips at this point.

18:42 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Which is a slightly different technology. It's called liquid crystal on silicon and it takes light and reflects it through an LCD panel. Correct, it's a little bit different and probably more expensive.

18:55 - Kris Deering (Guest)
Yeah, it's kind of almost a combination of the two, because you are using still kind of like an LCD, but you're also doing reflective light. The other problem is that, as most people know, SXRD and Elkos the two Sony's is SXRD, Elkos is what JVC calls theirs. They have a much higher native dynamic range than what you get from DLP and LCD. That's kind of been their bread and butter in terms of like their selling point.

19:27
Well, that also costs them a ton of light. So what happens is you have basically an efficiency rating when it comes to these technologies. So how much light that's getting on to the chip that's then going out of the lens, right? So if I have to pass it through something, how much is that taking away from? How much are you losing? Yeah, correct. Well, with DLP, there's almost none, because it is a pure reflective technology that's just coming basically in and out. So you don't need to have a big light source to generate the light that you need to get through it, which is why you can see these really compact designs that have high output everywhere Right Now, with deal with Elkos and SXrd, you know, jbc has basically stated that they're like about a 50 ratio.

20:19
So if you're going to do a 3000 lumen projector, you technically need a light source that's putting out 6 000 or more lumens, and then you have to have the heat dissipation for that light. So, like, yeah, things like. So now you have a bigger chassis, you have to worry about cooling and, again, all of this is done internally. Jvc isn't selling JVC projectors to brand X and Y so that they can put their name on it and things like that. Now they try to spread their market out by, you know, in the terms of JVC. They're using their simulation market.

20:56
So JVC is one of the major manufacturers of simulation projectors that are used for flight simulators and things like that. So they're leveraging that market to help with this market. They can, you know, put their R and D costs into that, because they have more than one market to kind of sell to. And then obviously Sony has. They're just such a huge company to begin with that I'm sure they can leverage it across multiple different things. But that's really where that comes from, where the you know how efficient the light engine is and how much you know cooling and stuff is involved with. It is completely different when you're talking about a dlp versus an lcd versus an l cost projector and then you know who's doing the r? D and the development of the chip. You know, in the case of dlp, all of that's off the table. You're just buying a package from ti, right, so you can spend more of your money on other things where you, you know JVC and Sony have to build everything that you see in there from the ground up.

21:59 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Yeah, so Well, that explains that. Thank you, I appreciate it. John and Steve, I want to ask you a somewhat related question, which is why put super expensive models like those top two and compare them if you will, the over $25,000 models in the same shootout with the under $10,000 models?

22:25 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Well, they were separated out. So we didn't compare the $25,000 plus to to the 10,000 and under leak. So we wanted to get a good overview and, like I was mentioning before, like JVC and Sony, they have those steps as you go up. So it didn't seem to make sense to us to test those middle models, because we can kind of extrapolate from the two extremes, the low end and the high end. And so anybody who wanted to see how the high end units would do, they got to see that, and anybody who wanted to see how the lower end units would do, got to see that, and then, if they wanted to, if they had their budget hits in the middle we can talk about. Here's the benefit that the middle model brings More brightness, better color gamut coverage, more refined image, better lens, you know. So we had we could extrapolate by having those extremes. Okay, so we could extrapolate by having those extremes.

23:12 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Okay, steve, tell us a little bit about the physical setup. What were your source devices? Did you run everything through a switcher? I assume all the projectors got the same signal.

23:26 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Yep, yep, exactly. So, like Chris said, we had the two Stewart SNOMAT screens and then we set up two tables with the groups of projectors so that we could switch back and forth. Um, and then we had a Kaleidoscape Strat OS, uh, as one of the sources so that we could uh have a, a set of scripted clips, um, rather than you know, handling discs. But then Chris also, uh, had a little bit of source material that he wanted to pull from a disc, had a little bit of source material that he wanted to pull from a disc, so we used a Sony UHD player for that. So those sources went into a four input, one output switcher and then that went into a one input, four output. Can't say the word Splitter, yep, exactly. And so most of the projectors were seeing the same signal all at the same time, simultaneously. But if we were testing one group, the other group of projectors was turned off, and then we would just, chris would play a clip and then we could switch from one projector to the next on the fly.

24:26 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Very good. Now all the projectors were calibrated, I believe, and we have a couple of pictures of at least Chris doing that. I think, sammy, you were involved in that as well, right, yes, yeah, so here's a picture of you guys doing some calibration ahead of the actual event, and there was another picture that I don't know who took these pictures. This one has a nice view of the screen and also of the computer, with some of the results of the calibration, yeah, and that one's much more reflective of what the room actually looked like.

24:58 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Because, again, you get that oh, look at all the ambient light in the room. That's the exposure of the camera.

25:02 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Exactly, exactly, yeah, so. Sammy how was the calibration process? Did it go pretty smoothly?

25:11 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
It went pretty smoothly. So, like in that picture there, for instance, chris was taking the readings and I was controlling the projector, and basically that's kind of how we did a lot of it. Some of it was done off site ahead of time and then we brought it to the actual venue location, we measured them to make sure that they held up. If they didn't hold up, then we basically did them again and we basically just went through SDR doing brightness matching. So that was completely as close as we can get. So some might be like 104 nits, some might be exactly 100 nits, and then for HDR we just did full out, but in that case we were working on the Epson the QB1000. In that case we're doing, we're working on the epson the qb1000 in that one picture, um and we just use different processes. So, for instance, we had to do a lot of different things that most people probably would not normally do with, like, say, for instance, the sony, um, like what?

26:12 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
so trade secrets here maybe kind of um.

26:19 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
So basically what we did with the sony is we ended up going in and loading a custom 1d um to the actual projector itself and after we did that we then ended up going through and using Projector Calibrator Pro to get it closer, because if we had just left it as is, it wouldn't have been representative of what it could be. So we did those two things and then we still went through and calibrated it afterwards. So we did a lot of stuff like that. We did a lot of direct uploads and custom guts for the JVC's. We did that for the Sony. We use a lot of the web GUI control for the absence and then for the valerian we just went through and used the user controls that were available to it.

27:13 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
This by the way, is a good example of why, when you're spending that kind of money on a projector, you want to hire a professional calibrator. I have always said this If you're buying $100 TV or $200 TV, there's no point. But if you're spending this kind of money, you really want to hire a professional calibrator who has all these tricks in their toolbox.

27:37 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Yeah, we of course, are big believers in that. Yeah, chris, and Sammy's involvement. I just wanted to piggyback what Sammy just said. Every attempt was made to make each projector look as good as it possibly could. Like, some of those samples were manufactured samples that have been shipped around, so we wanted to try to get them looking as good as possible possibly could. Some of those samples were manufactured samples that had been shipped around, so we wanted to try to get them looking as good as possible.

27:57 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Sure yeah, the Sony required a lot of tricks, that was required, but I don't know how much of that is.

28:03 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Again, it was a sample that had been shipped around, and so it's a little bit more.

28:06 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Right, it might have needed some extra care. Yeah, you're going to come across sample to sample variants, like some reviewers get Right.

28:13 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Yeah, you're going to come across sample to sample variants. That's unavoidable, Right, Exactly. So you have to account for that. And then you also have things just in regards to the room itself. So you have to contend with a lot of different scenarios, but I mean, for the most part, that was a sample that was, you know, lent to us that who knows what it could have been through. So we just wanted to make sure that it was correct.

28:44 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
So who were the attendees? Who came to look at these and share their opinions?

28:52 - John Schuermann (Guest)
Well, I think that was probably most of what I was while these guys were sweating, trying to get all this stuff set up. I mean, I, the amount like said, like sammy said, they were setting up all these projectors, pre-calibrated them and in many cases had to calibrate them again at the other venue. Um, while they were doing that, I was trying to do promotional stuff. So on facebook and avs forum I put out a call to whoever wanted to come. We had some people fly in from California and other places and one shootout we did we had people come in from Canada. So we've had people come in from all over because they want to see these things side by side and under controlled circumstances. Again, that's how the Screen Room kind of made its name the controlled circumstances conditions part of it. So it was people we didn't charge for the shootout so anybody could come. So we had probably 10 to 15 people at various times each day. So probably 30 people total over a couple of days.

29:47
Some, like I said, from far away, many from local, some who had been to our previous shootout, but these were mostly. Most of them were like I would call informed enthusiasts. That were. You know, there were some complete lay people there too, but there were also people that kind of knew what they at least they thought they needed to look for. I think it was eye-opening. And we try not to be snobs at all at these things. We talk very casually and try to take the time to explain the stuff and easy to understand terms, without talking over people's head or talking down to people. At least that's our goal, hopefully people feel that way.

30:22 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Well, I hope so too, and here we've seen a couple of photos from the event of some of the attendees, and this is with the lights on in the room. Yes, I was also happy to see at least one woman there. Our hobby is mostly men, let's face it.

30:38 - John Schuermann (Guest)
It is. It was in 80, 20. We had a fair number of women there which we were happy to see. Oh yeah, Often they have sometimes the most perceptive comments oh, no, kidding. Wow, that's great.

30:56 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
I would say, especially when we do the audio test, because hearing tends to be better. Now, among the activities there, chris gave a presentation. We have a picture of that and, chris, you were sort of setting the situation up, setting the scene, as it were upsetting the scene, as it were.

31:13 - Kris Deering (Guest)
Yeah, I tried my best at the beginning of this to basically convey as much bias as possible so that the people that the things that I really wanted to show as the best, were the best. No, in the beginning it was basically just a rundown of like this is the way that we're going to run it. These are the reasons why we're going to run it. These are the reasons why we're going to run it. This is the second event that I've done with the screening room.

31:42
It's been nice to have the time and the resources to be able to do something like this, and not every dealer out there does stuff like this. A lot of times you just feel like, oh, we're just going to open them up, put them out, you know, put them on a table and show them, and things like that. The care that goes into this really makes a huge difference, I feel. But I talked about the fact that you know we weren't going to show side-by-side images. A lot of people you people, even at the event were like, well, why not just show it side-by-side? It shows more of a drastic difference between the two and there is merit to that. I mean, again, no matter how you're going to do these, there's going to be people that have opinions on how you should have done it or not.

32:30
Sure, of course you should have done it or not, but I truly believe that when you're talking about judging images, you know, when we're watching something in your theater room, your living room or anything like that, you're only watching one image at a time and your perception of that image is based on just watching one at a time. I've seen so many people over the years that I've done this here, even at my theater, in my house or at other places, where they'll look at a projector or they'll bring their projector to because they want to compare it to something I might have, and they'll say something along the lines of like oh well, my projector doesn't look like that as soon as I put it side by side with something else. Oh, you must have changed something. But the problem is, is your perception of that image now is skewed, because you're looking at another image next to it, and what I wanted to be able to achieve was just saying that, look, I'm going to show you an image you know like, let's say, a two minute clip or a one minute clip, and then I'm going to show it to you on the next one, and then I'm going to show it to you on the next one. And if in that time you know you, watching that subjectively, you don't really notice any difference between the two. The odds are the difference between the two isn't enough to really merit it. Now if you start seeing, you know clear differences between the two, then you probably have enough difference between them. But if I put two images side by side, you start seeing the things where one. Any kind of differences are a lot more obvious than they would have been if you just saw one or the other. But you also start seeing things that are just things you can't control.

34:13
So Sammy and I did the calibrations on these and we tried our best to get them as tightly calibrated as possible. But in calibration there's always error. So you know, if you have a red, green, blue based you know visual system, you know coming out of the projector and they are all at the same, you know, close to the same error rate. Well, one could be erroring closer to blue than red, but they still have the overall same error rate. So then you could have two images next to each other where one's a little reddish, where one's a little bluish, and people are like well, I don't like that one, it's you know. Like. You know, brand X is always kind of blue and I don't like blue, I'd rather it be red. Well, I can make that one look red and I can make that one look blue.

34:55
We didn't perceptually match the errors, we just calibrated them to and tried to get as low as errors we can. So we didn't want things like that skewing that. But at the end of every session. So when we got done with like the lower end models or the higher end models, we went through a script of sorts of all this different material, at the end we would open it up and say, hey, we'll use the next, you know, 15 minutes to any request for a side by side. You know you want to see this projector versus this one.

35:28
If they were in the same group with any of the content that we watched, if they were in the same group with any of the content that we watched, and I think everybody here would be in agreement that 99.9% of the time that that happens, it's always the dark material.

35:48
It's always people asking to see like the torture test of, like you know, the super dark material, because in general, most of the time these projectors almost look, you know, exactly the same with the vast majority of the brighter to mid tone things where people really see the dramatic differences between them right at the lower end. So they tend to concentrate like, oh, I really want to see how much. And then it's even really more apparent depending on you know which display you were comparing to another. Sure, I think the only time we actually did a side-by-side of brighter material or mid-range material was when we actually forced that. You know, john had had asked to do a bright clip comparison between two of them and I did kind of more of a mid-tone clip, just because it was like, again, everybody always just picks the dark stuff.

36:36 - John Schuermann (Guest)
And those were illustrative of concepts too, chris, it was very important or very valid points that we were making about what was going on in those two things when we did our own side side yeah in a vacuum.

36:48 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
You're usually not going to see most of the things that people will see in a vacuum. You would never notice it. You would actually need to have something that is side by side and you would have to start pointing things out or know specifically what you're looking for right but, like chris said, if you don't notice it just by going from a to b to c, it doesn't really merit enough worth to like for you to actually notice it because it's so small.

37:16 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
You would only notice it outside of a vacuum right, we have a couple pictures just wanted to show everybody. Uh, again, these are photos from the event. So here people are looking at one of the screens on the left and you can see the right screen is dark and you guys put a curtain between them, which is a good idea, a black curtain. And then in the next one, you don't see the left screen in this one, but it's dark and you can see people are looking at the right side screen. And then, finally, as Chris said, when somebody said okay, what would you like to see side by side In the next graph, you can see that they showed that. And here's an example of why a photograph isn't a good idea to evaluate image quality, because these two images look different. I'm sure they didn't look that way in the room.

38:07 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Right. That's another reason that you don't want to show both at the same time, because, even though they were kind of in their own little cove, you still have it because it's all reflective light, right. So it's bouncing off the screen to the wall in the back, back to the screen, so, like when we were calibrating, for instance, you could have one screen completely off. We could have a 10 window of, say, magenta up and that far left screen is looking magenta.

38:34 - Steve Crabb (Guest)
Um, so you're going to contaminate the other wall right, so you're going to contaminate the other screen if you showed both at the same time anyways and then you'd introduce even more error if you try to take pictures or video of it, because now you have a, a camera where you've got to pick something to white, balance against, and so uh, so that you could end up with two displays that look very different. Maybe one looks like it's a little pink and one looks like it's a little green, but in reality and and and the, the differences between the two are accentuated even more right, yeah, um, so you were talking earlier, chris, about, um, some of the clips that you use, and I just wanted to identify some of them.

39:16 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Uh, the ice scene from alpha must have been a very bright scene, right correct.

39:22 - Kris Deering (Guest)
yeah, we, we tried to get a really good balance of material, from really bright punchy color, you know things to kind of a mid-range, you know your average kind of content to a couple scenes that were extremely dark.

39:39 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
So, you know, cover all the bases Like, for example, the dark one Night Helicopter Raid from Zero Dark, thirty Correct and one of the dark scenes from Oblivion Tom Cruise movie, his first meeting with Morgan Freeman in the cave or in the building somewhere really dark. But also that movie has some really bright scenes.

40:00 - Kris Deering (Guest)
Yeah, we did use another sequence from that because that was our only high definition clip. We actually used the HD version of that movie, oh. So we did a sequence where he's sitting on again, like I tried to use some content that people have used before. The Zero Dark Thirty one we had. John and Steve had been at a local Sony demonstration and they had used that clip specifically, so I picked that one as the dark one because Sony had used it in the past, so it didn't look like I was trying to skew, like, oh, these people would never use that clip. Well, they used it in their own demonstrations, yeah. And then the oblivion clip. I just knew that that had some really bright sequences that people use, where he's sitting on the mountain and he's like watering that little flower. I've seen that one used plenty of times, so I use that one. And then the dark clip. And then I also did an assortment.

40:54
We had at least three different clips in there that really are not representative of anything people would watch, unless you just like watching YouTube clips. But we used a Sony. It provided a drive that had some stuff. So we used one that was like highlights from a soccer game and it was shot, you know, with cameras where it's super sharp, lots of color, really bright. There was a clip of Rio de Janeiro during Carnivale, and then we used the Peru clip that has been used by Sony, jvc and everything else. It was actually on a jvc hdr disc but it's a.

41:30
It's a third-party content that they licensed and I've seen other ones use it, which again looks a lot like what you see when you go like best buy or whatever, and they always have these like really bright, super sharp, you know nature photography stuff that again doesn't look like anything but itself. But I thought that that would be nice, for if people were trying to compare bright, really sharp stuff to see like, oh, does these 1080p eShift projectors look as good as the native 4k projectors? Or hey, I've heard the JVCs aren't as sharp as the Sonys. Or I've heard the, you know, the single chip DLP is super sharp and these are going to look dull, you would have content that would hopefully bring that out if people noticed it.

42:10
And I don't even think anybody commented on anything.

42:14 - John Schuermann (Guest)
I don't think we had one comment, even in the written stuff that people submitted, or even at the show a sharpness difference which would actually bulge well for Epson, because the Epson is a 1080p pixel shipper. So is the DLP, so is the DLP. Don't want to jump ahead too much.

42:29 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
No, no, no. We're going to get to the results in part two, which, in fact, I think it's about time to mosey on for now. So let's pick this up in part two, when we will talk about the results of the shootout and the takeaways after two days of viewing. For now, I want to thank you all for being here John Schuerman, owner of the Screening Room AV at wwwthescreeningroomavcom. That'll be in our show notes. Thanks so much for being here. Oh, I had a good time as usual. And Steve Crabb, sales and marketing and system designer at the Screening Room. Thank you. Thanks, scott. Chris Deering, owner of Deep Dive AV, professional calibration, consulting and education at wwwdeepdiveavcom. That'll also be in the show notes, thanks, chris. Thank you so much, scott. And Sammy Prescott jr, a professional ISF level three calibrator.

43:34 - Sammie Prescott Jr (Guest)
Where can folks find you online? You can reach me through projector centralcom. Like you have a contact list, you can reach me there and you could also reach me through the screening room. I'm listed on there as a partner.

43:46 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
Very good, great. Well, that's it for this episode, but be sure to join us for part two, where, when we reveal what the results were of the 2025 projector shootout from the screening room AV. Now, if you have a question for me, please send it along to htg at twittv. I will answer as many as I can right here on the show and, as you know by now, all Twitch shows, including Home Theater Geeks, are available for free-free. Join the club. Go to twittv, slash club twit to sign up and get all of our content ad-free Until next time. Geek out.