Watching TV can be really expensive if you turn on the TV only for a couple of hours every year. We still have to pay the full CHF 460 annual fee even if we use it only 4 to 5 hours a year. That’s an insanely high CHF 100 per hour. What we do more often is watching videos on the beamer. I enjoy the big screen experience even if the picture is not as sharp as the fancy new 4k TV’s that you see in every store now. But lately our old beamer started accumulating pixel errors. The LED lamp of the five year old Acer K10 was still perfectly fine, but the DLP chip wore out apparently. As it also only supported analog signals, it was about time for a replacement. I wanted something bigger, brighter with at least FullHD resolution. But then it would no longer fit into the small wooden box under the ceiling. So a bit further back, it should be possible to get the cabling from the fridge. This turned out to be not as easy as I first imagined. That’s when I found out about ultra short throw projectors. They make all the cabling much much easier. Instead of transmitting the signals across the room, everything is conveniently in one place just like with a regular TV.
Because my wive wanted to be able to watch TV (just in case) and our old TV was not working any more with everything switching to digital, I decided for an LG PF1000U. Most ultra short throw projectors have only WXGA resolution. This was one of the few FullHD ones. As it later turned out, the built in TV tuner was of no use, being for terrestrial signals only. I had to buy a cable tuner separately.
As with most bigger acquisitions, I checked where I could buy it with BitCoin. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a merchant in Switzerland. And the offers from Germany seemed like too much hassle with customs. So I ordered from a regular Swiss retailer, and paid using bitwa.la.
Watching movies with it is really a pleasant experience. The picture is a lot better than before, and it does 3D very well, even with $12 shutter glasses from China.
Compared to my very first beamer that I built myself from an overhead projector and a flatpanel monitor, it’s worlds apart…
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