Vintage Video Projector Lives Again

December 10, 2015 by James Hobson 20 Comments

Projectors are getting a lot less expensive these days, what with China pumping out Pico projectors by the boat load and all. But did you know it’s not that hard to convert an old slide projector to digital? [Alec Smecher] shows us how with a 1950’s LaBelle 75 slide projector, and the result is pretty awesome.

Digital projectors can use a few different technologies to work. The best, and brightest is DLP (Digital Light Processing) by Texas Instruments — which is pretty well the world-wide standard for high-end, high-lumen digital projection. It works by bouncing red, green, and blue light off of three DMD’s (Digital Micromirror Devices) which have an array of tiny 2-position mirrors, with each representing a pixel.

One of the older technologies is LCD, which is even easier to understand. You shine white light through a color LCD, and there is your projection. All you need for a projector, then, is an LCD, a light source, and a bit of optics.

Continue reading “Vintage Video Projector Lives Again” →

Make An HD Projector For Next To Nothing!

March 13, 2014 by James Hobson 54 Comments

Need a high definition projector? Don’t have a thousand bucks sitting around? Then this hack is for you! [TheJinxster] threw together this awesome HD projector, and it cost him absolutely nothing to build!

He started by picking up an old overhead projector off of Freecycle. Freecycle is a great grassroots network, kind of like Kijiji or Craigslist — but everything is free. It’s all about reuse and keeping useful things out of the landfills. Anyway, he also had an old LCD monitor sitting around gathering dust…

Putting two and two together he took apart the LCD, laid the bare screen on top of the glass and, well, that’s it! It’s seriously that simple. The hardest part was taking apart the monitor — the overhead projector and mounted lens took care of the rest. The beauty with a system like this is you can get high definition out of a relatively small and cheap LCD panel! The only thing is it won’t last forever — LCDs (especially monitor LCDs) aren’t designed to pass through that much light.

Don’t believe us? Check out the following video.

Continue reading “Make An HD Projector For Next To Nothing!” →

DIY 3D Projector From An LCD

December 10, 2013 by James Hobson 7 Comments

We’ve shared many home made projectors in the past, but we think this might just be the first home made 3D projector!

[Nicholas] has created a wonderful write up on this project on his blog, and in an Instructable, and even more details are available on the original forum post (in French though).

To sum it up though, he’s using an old LCD from a broken laptop, split into two halves. By using a Fresnel lens and two separate optical lenses that are adjustable he can combine the two images (top and bottom of the LCD) on the wall. Then by adding a polarization filter to each lens, he can reuse the cheap 3D goggles from the cinema for his own setup to see in 3D! This style of passive 3D does require a special projector screen to keep the polarization intact — he’s using a Da-Lite Silverlight screen, whose metallic surface ensures the polarization is kept the same.

It’s a great project and is definitely worth checking out. If you’re in the mood for a smaller form factor projector, it’d be worth checking out this one we covered quite a few years ago!