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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> and a projector has tons of downsides?

I'm not so sure. I've been using a projector as a TV for something like four years straight: no TV at home, only a projector. As a bonus the living room becomes a home cinema. I didn't see much downsides. Zero issue. No ads. Cheaper than a TV for a much wider diagonal and a more "cinema'ish" picture too (I hate it when movies look like cheap sitcoms on modern TVs).

And as many of these are made to show slides and whatnots in corporate settings, ads are a big no-no.

I think more people should seriously consider that option.

EDIT: well I remember one issue... I decided to fix it and it took longer than the time it'd have take to hook a TV. But I did it exactly once, used some fishtape to pull HDMI cables in the system ceiling and family was good to go for years.

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> I hate it when movies look like cheap sitcoms on modern TVs

This really is the trope about LCD TVs that will not die. I blame the manufacturers.

Yes, it looks terrible. It’s called motion smoothing (or something like it) and it’s often switched on - for reasons I cannot possibly fathom - when TVs are in demo mode and/or in the showroom.

And it is absolutely trivial to disable. Most any modern TV is either fully capable of playing 24p / 30p and 60p at native frame rate, or playing 60p at native, 30p at half-rate and 24p at 3:2 pulldown, in each case without any interpolated frames muddying the native presentation. It looks perfectly great (while 3:2 pulldown is perceived as juddery by some, that’s an issue any projector incapable of either 120hz or native 24p would also share).

There are loads of legitimate reasons to prefer projectors over flat panels (and vice versa); motion smoothing is not one of them.

I've been using a projector in my bedroom because I do occasionally want to watch something while laying in bed, but don't generally like a TV in the room.

Potential problems, all fixable:

Can't see it during the day or when using the lights.

Had to run power and data to the ceiling.

Lower resolution for the price.

Can't use the wall for anything else or need to install a screen; paint choice a potential issue (bad color, too glossy). (Also need a wall without windows that is large enough.)

That said, the pros vastly outweigh the cons for me and projectors have gotten cheaper and better in the near decade since I installed mine.

Another con is that I hate the fan noise.

You sound like somebody going on about how vinyl is better than CDs. Sure, projectors give you that "authentic" cinema look, in the sense of bad color reproduction, especially being unable to show dark blacks like OLEDs can.

The "cheap sitcom" look is objectively better. With the right filters you can reproduce the cinema look; but nobody who isn't already used to it would want to to that, unless you are going for a specific "old school" style.

The "cheap sitcom" look is objectively worse, but it can be disabled on every TV I've encountered so far. If I bought a TV that didn't allow me to disable it I'd return it as defective.

>I hate it when movies look like cheap sitcoms on modern TVs

That has nothing to do with "TVs" in general and more the software smoothing settings that are on by default. Properly configured (takes literally minutes or less one time) using a website like rtings.com for the optimal settings, a TV will look better than a similar quality projector every time, and in greater lighting situations. There's a reason why projectors aren't popular and it's not because people forget about them. Movies on my OLED TV look incredible, better than a cinema frankly.

Since we're talking Samsung, there's a picture mode called FILMMAKER (weirdly all caps I know) that promises to not do any 'smart' fuckery. And I guess there's an alliance of other manufacturers too who offer the same mode with the same name.

https://www.trustedreviews.com/explainer/what-is-filmmaker-m...

While that's a good thing it's really just a preset and you can get there with any TV by disabling all those "enhancements".

A big cons for me is that it's useless on bright room, as who prefer bright room. Darker room is fine to watch movie sometimes, but I just buy a TV to cover all use case.

I've never seen a great projector that doesn't make a ton of white noise form the fan. Do "silent" projectors exist?

Not 100% silent, but lots of new projectors are based on LED/laser lamps, which produce a lot less waste heat.

Plus there's now ultra-short-throw projectors that sit in the front of the room, rather than above / behind you.

Ultra-short-throw also has the advantage that you can use from-below lenticular screens. This means that ambient room light affects them a lot less, since they refelect light mostly coming from only where the projector is.

Sadly, "smart TV" has infected projectors as well. But maybe not as bad as normal TVs. Most projectors still have dumb inputs that work fine.

It's 2022 and recent projector models are also joining the smart internet-connected advertising hellfest now.

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