Need Help With Projector

[battery]

I've got a Optima FS704 projector with a native res of 800 by 600 (i got it on sale..). Its max res is 1080i and it looks amazing when i hook up my xbox 360 to it thru a component to vga connector that i quickly made, but when i hook it up to my pc anything above 800x600 looks crappy - in the sense that its trying to cram every line in and it looks.. ya know.. weird (like with any lcd monitor with a non native resolution).

My question: why does the 360 look epic at 1080i, while my comp look like crap at anything greater than 800x600 (especially 1080i)

 

[Adam]

Welcome to the forum, battery! Very, very clever thread title. Got my attention, no question.

Two possibilities come to mind:
1. Are you using a specific PC input? Some projectors/TVs have resolution limits on those inputs. I don't know why, but I've seen it in the literature.

2. My speculation would be that 1080i (or any interlaced setting) would look strange because the PC is almost surely outputting a progressive signal - unless you can tell it to do interlaced. Computer monitors are progressive scan, so video cards are set up to do progressive output.

Can your projector do 720p?

Adam

 

[battery]

ive got my projector running at 720p thru my decrepit GeFarce FX 5200, through a vga port. The projector, unlike with my 360, doesnt say 720p, but it shows 1280x720, maybe thats got something to do with it.

i remember some nvidia driver allowed me to treat a device as an HD display.

 

[BMXTRIX]

I believe the US version of this is the Optoma EP706...
http://www.projectorcentral.com/Optoma-EP706.htm

There's no straightforward answer other than to point out that this is a SVGA projector. It isn't 1080i, but is 800x600 which means that if you are filling the screen, that's what you get. If you feed it 1080i, the projector must scale that signal down to 800x600 to fit on the screen, so you are losing a great deal of information, but with video, this typically can be done fairly cleanly.

Anything about SVGA, such as XGA, or up to the max accepted resolution of 1400x1050 will be scaled down to fit inside the SVGA area. This is going to throw out a certain amount of data and always leads to a softer image.

Now why does it look so bad? I'm not exactly sure really. If you are using a VGA connection from the PC to the projector (not component) it may pass through a different scaler than the X360 passes through using component. If you aren't using VGA then you may be feeding it an oddball resolution, or the wrong signal type, or even a lower resolution such as 480i.

Since computers have different video cards that behave differently, it could be any number of things actually related to the computer, and not the projector, but you may want to try a different PC if you can.

 

[Adam]

It's been an hour and a half since my post - when abouts should I be expecting my beer to arrive?

Don't forget BMXTRIX, either, of course.

 

[battery]

I'll send you it pooly packaged so it'll be DOA!!! muahahaha pcb beer
sidenote: i love the coors light beer label commercial!

back to the whole "projector" thing, i updated the nvidias newest driver and.. yeap. thats all i've got to report so far.