It’s time for the big review. This one is going to crush your dreams I’m afraid, but at least I’ll save you some money.
To start off with a disclaimer, I want to stress that I am not a video/sound professional, I have never worked during my high school holidays at an electronics store and have no will or want to climb into an attic to install cables.
Alright, so let’s start off with my equipment:
- Sony PS3 (BluRay Player) – with Bluetooth remote
- Sony STR KG 700
- Samsung HL-P4667W (DLP) 46″
One day
Not the best equipment, my Achilles heal is definitely the TV which supports 720p at it’s highest resolution. A fairly big jump from 1080p outputted by the BluRay.
The sounds system is simple, but effective. It supports 5.1, Dolby and all of those things I don’t understand. To put it simply, it has surround sound and it’s loud enough for the room.
And speaking of the room, it’s probably a little over 3m by 3m (15ft by 15ft) and doubles up as a games/movie room and my home office.
Everything is connected with expensive cables, HDMI for the video and optical for the audio.
So last night my wife and I sat down to watch a movie. Vicky Christina Barcelona. It’s a pretty good movie, I recommend it and I specifically wanted something low key for my first test. The reason being is that action movies which are always shown in demos look good and sounds good purely because of everything going on at once, and I always find that loud takes over surround sound, so I wanted something .. quiet.
The video quality was very good, crisp and smooth. The downfall of rear projection is the that black is not really black, always a slight grey (I’m not sure of the technical reasons, but an LCD would take care of that).
The sounds was very precise. My rear speakers are mounted just behind the viewing area and I took quite a bit of time playing around with the settings to get the distances and heights just right. I was very happy with the quality. I defintely achieved a “theater” setting.
So far so good. Except that I wasn’t overwhelmed and amazed that I was watching a movie on BluRay. I mean I knew it wasn’t VHS, but I couldn’t tell if it was simply DVD or not.
After that I popped in Spiderman 3, as it came free with the PS3 and tried that on for size. As expected and mentioned, much louder, much more action. Definitely a big difference, but again nothing that I hadn’t experienced before.
So I’m scratching it all down to the fact that to really appreciate the full effect you need to spend the money on all aspects of the system.
1080p is a must, as is a 7.1 channel receiver which BluRay outputs to. It just wouldn’t make sense spending the money on one piece of hardware without the others.
PS3 games still look and sound amazing however, going to kill some zombies.