Brilliant idea or pipe dream?

S

Skipper007

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 28, 2004
Messages
185
Okay, I definately can't afford to do this one at the moment, but I just got a crazy idea last night.

You know Matrox's double and triplehead to go devices? I'm not a big fan of the fact that you have the monitor bezels cutting into your view with such a setup. But I was just thinking... if you used two or three LCD projectors and aligned them correctly, you'd have a absolutely enourmous, ultra wide screen.

I think two projectors would work nicely for such as setup... two 4:3 projectors gives you a 2.66:1 aspect ration, which I think is probably just about right... not to mention it would fit 2.35:1 movies pretty well (I thought about three 4:3 projectors in landscape mode to give a 9:4, or 2.25:1 aspect ratio, but I don't think Matrox's gear supports having the monitors in landscape mod like that.

Now, there would of course be quite a few issues. For starters, I don't think you can hook consoles up to the Matrox hardware and expect it to work properly. Second, you'd need software that could cut out the black bars on your 2.35 DVDs, and third, Matrox's gear doesn't work with Crossfire (although it would work with SLI). I also don't think Matrox's hardware is HDCP compliant, which would kind of suck because such a setup would probably be awesome with HD-DVD.

Oh, and of course you'd need a ton of free space to actually set it up!
 
properly made dvd's dont have any black bars built in, the player itself puts those up depending on the screen type you are outputing to.
 
Martyr said:
properly made dvd's dont have any black bars built in, the player itself puts those up depending on the screen type you are outputing to.
Click to expand...

I knew that was the case with 16:9 anamorphic DVDs... is it the case with 2.35:1 DVDs as well?
 
sounds pretty difficult to really allign 2 projectors like that personally... expect many many many hours of slightly nudging them - I'd suggest building some kind of base to secure them into - with adjustable feet on it or something I dunno - it would just suck to get it like 99.9% aligned and then the dog's tail hits the table haha.

as for if there's a video card setup that would function for this... I definately think you're on the right track. It sounds doable on the computer end.
 
Why would you need to use matrox? Wouldnt any vid card with dual outputs be able to achieve the same result? And if they support VIVO, you can hook up all sorts of inputs to it too... Mmmmmmmmmm

Although the good thing about projectors is that you can scale the size of the image. You can get a huge image with a single projector. So in this case all you're getting is just a sharper image - more pixels, which is only good if you have HD contect, etcetc.
 
The reason I'd use the Matrox gear (one of the external boxes, not a video card) is because it treats the two or three projectors as a single monitor... which is good for games.

I suppose the single projector route would work too, but I might be inclined to try a multi projector route if I ever had serious cash around.
 
I've setup 4 projectors at work to do just this without the Matrox part. I just used 2 PCI-e cards with their 4 outputs. I used an adjustable storage shelf and put 2 up top and 2 down low to fill up a wall. Gave me a resolution of 2048x1536 instead of 1024x768 with a single projector. Took me a good 2 hours to get the projectors to where they lined up perfectly, but still, it was only 8 feet tall and about 10 feet 8 inches wide. Wish I took pictures.
 
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