There are two ways to go about setting up a home theater. The first option is to rope off a room in your house, seal the windows, and then make any and all necessary modifications to turn it into a dedicated movie palace. The second, more common option is to take a space your family actually lives, works, and plays in and adapt it so that it can easily go from sitting to screening room.
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FAST FACTS
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DIMENSIONS 15 x 1 3/4 x 8 1/2 inches |
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KEY FEATURES
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| • Corrects for off-center projector placement, up to 40° horizontal and 30° vertical • Scales all video to projector's native display format • inputs: DVI, VGA (RGB), standard and wideband component-video (wideband doubles as RGB+H/V), and composite/S-video; RS-232 • outputs: DVI and VGA (RGB) |
Video front projectors offer the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to image size — and quality. But getting one to work its best has often meant pursuing Option No. 1: a dedicated, custom-built theater. That’s because front projectors are notoriously fussy beasts, demanding not just a cavelike environment but parallel placement and a direct line of sight to a screen positioned on the other side of the room. In the past, installers have found these requirements to be at odds with family rooms, but that was before Silicon Optix came out with its Image AnyPlace processor.
Looking and acting for the most part like a regular video scaler, the processor accepts standard and high-def signals from a DVD player, game console, or satellite/cable receiver and converts them to a format that matches your video display’s native resolution. For example, it can take the 480i (interlaced) output from a DVD player and translate it to match an LCD projector’s 1,280 x 720-pixel progressive display. It also offers high-quality deinterlacing of standard video originating on both film and video.
Where the Image AnyPlace differs from other processors is its digital keystone correction, which compensates for off-center projector positioning. The $2,500 base version lets you install a front projector up to 40° horizontally and 30° vertically off-center relative to the screen — a wide enough range to compensate for many room issues that would otherwise require remodeling. And for another $1,500, eWARP Designer software lets you do even more creative stuff, like projecting onto curved screens.
The slim, silver-faced processor’s angled front panel is equipped with a full suite of backlit control buttons. These will come in handy if you lose — or, more likely, crush — the flimsy remote control. (At least its keypad is backlit and well laid out.) A full complement of connectors is on the rear panel (see “key features”), including an RS-232 serial port for use with advanced home theater control systems.
The processor has plenty of picture controls that you can substitute for your projector’s own settings, including three col or-temperature presets and four gamma presets to fine-tune gradations of black and white. There’s also a user color-temperature setting with red, green, and blue adjustments. Four deinterlacing options are available for standard programs, but I got good results by just selecting Auto and letting the processor make the decisions.
To test the Image AnyPlace, I used a DVI cable to connect it to a Panasonic PT-AE500U LCD projector placed on a table 10 feet from an 80-inch wide Stewart GrayHawk screen. At first, I put the projector directly on the screen’s center axis to check out its basic video processing (scaling and deinterlacing) capabilities.
In tough test scenes on DVD — like the scene in Toy Story where the Speak-and-Spell toy stumbles toward Woody — the Image Anyplace did a topnotch job of delivering clean images with smooth diagonal and vertical lines. And when I switched to watching video-based programs like NASCAR racing on Dish Network, the lines of the bleachers looked solid. But the processor’s built-in comb filter provided only average performance with composite-video signals, and there was no noise reduction or detail enhancement to improve the poor-quality channels — like the consistently awful Golf Channel.
Afterward, I slid the projector 30° out on the horizontal plane, making the necessary adjustments and comparing the Image AnyPlace to the Panasonic’s built-in digital keystone correction. I expected to see the processor work some magic and wasn’t disappointed. I tweaked both the horizontal and vertical keystone adjustments until the Avia test DVD’s circle-hatch pattern looked almost perfect. But when I tried the same adjustment using the projector’s keystone correction, what a difference! The circles were more like ovals, and the pattern’s grid lines weren’t as evenly spaced.
The effects of the Image AnyPlace’s processing looked most dramatic with static computer graphics and text. The rows of text in a spreadsheet were blurry and smeared with the projector handling keystone correction. With the Image AnyPlace handling the processing, they were sharp and clear. I also noted differences when viewing a 720p high-def multiburst pattern from the Digital Video Essentials D-VHS tape, with the processor providing more detail than the projector.
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The differences between the Image AnyPlace and the projector’s own processing proved more subtle with aerial views of Ireland’s coast that I recorded from the Discovery HD channel. However, in an overhead shot of the craggy Cliffs of Moher, the processor delivered a wonderfully solid image. Viewed with the projector’s processing, the image was softer, and details in the rocks seemed to “crawl.”
Silicon Optix’s Image AnyPlace video processor might not be the answer to every video enthusiast’s needs. For example, it can’t recoup the big drop in picture brightness that’s an unavoidable side effect of digital keystone correction. And its DVI interface doesn’t support HDCP copy protection (a version with HDCP is planned for the future). But it does an impressive job of making images look right in rooms where front and center projector placement isn’t an option. By that trick alone, it’s bound to make a splash in the world of big-screen home theater.