spmbx wrote: ↑Wed Jul 23, 2025 6:51 pm
The thing about these is that they are 4:3 480p native. However, the previous still goes; inferior display technology by today's standards and an oled with a scaler will get you a much improved picture. You just need to handle some black bars left and right, since obviously a modern display will not be 4:3.
Still, i'd say a V401 / V402 is pretty cool to check out if you run into one for a decent price, which for me would probably be max 100 bucks. They used to go for a lot more a few years back though so my feeling tells me they will still go for more than i would pay.
Yeah, I understand the novelty of them. I still think that it's just a novelty though. But the image quality is very meh; no blacks to speak of, just shades of grey; contrast is terrible. I agree that they will probably hang onto a little premium as a novelty. How much who knows? They aren't really all that pleasant to look at anything on and people are spoiled for choice these days.
Personally, if I wanted a large format 4:3 image without pillar boxing, I would just use a projector.
Getting a decent image from a beamer is tricky, though.
If you want a high quality picture, you have to buy a nice screen and they are not cheap. Given the price and hassle of the installation, it makes more sense to go really big with huge proper cinema widescreen. The black bars and "boxed" penalty of 16:9 and 4:3 are mitigated by the size of the screen itself. The real advantage of a beamer is movies that aren't squished onto the screen or cropped--and enough raw screen real estate to make pillarboxes an afterthought for everything else.
orange808 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 25, 2025 6:02 pm
Getting a decent image from a beamer is tricky, though.
Very true. It took me a long time to tweak the install of both my screen and my projector so that I could get the image squared up on the screen without doing any image stretching.
Ultimately, I got a tripod head and mounted the projector upside-down on the wall from a small shelf that I purpose build for it. But it looks great and it's dead nuts square on the screen without any keystone correction or digital zoom.
