Celluon PicoPro

[Mik James]

A 720p direct laser display with many of the characteristics of CRT.

Mines arrives in a ~week, i'll be sure to fire up Thief and/or Dark Mod and comment on the performance

Here is a link to the thread on AVS for the non hdmi version: https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.avsforum.com/forum/68-digital-projectors-under-3-000-usd-msrp/1928497-celluon-picoair-any-experiences-yet.html&sa=U&ei=h6svVb-jAqfmsASi7IGQCg&ved=0CAUQFjAA&client=internal-uds-cse&usg=AFQjCNHkK1-6rhRj52HxzO5mthxSM6jVyg

[woah]

Very cool! I look forward to your impressions. Affordable OLED monitors are taking their sweet time to come to market and perhaps this will be a better option.

 

Also, how does the response time compare to CRT displays? Even nowadays every time I play an FPS on a good CRT monitor it makes me feel like I've been gaming on a flip-book for the past 10+ years or so.

[Bikerdude]

I Spent ages back in the day on TTLG looking for a capable monitor that could do deep blacks, but thus far only AMOLED/OLED has come close to CRT. So this will be interesting.

[chakkman]

Hehe, yeah, that's always the issue with TFT displays. On the other hand, afaik, CRT's always have had the problem of color streaking, which is especially visible with dark background, so it's not really nice for dark games too.

[Mik James]

Things i''l be looking for:

Perfect mll with shadow detail.

Any signs of Ghosting due to pixel transitions in high contrast areas.

Color breakup (similar to phosphor trails/dlp rainbows)

Input Lag

Noise in dark scenes. (Noticed this a lot on the Oc Rift)

Ability to maintain contrast in mixed scenes (a street lamp in a dark night for example

 

Feel free to clue me into anything else.

Edited April 16, 2015 by Mik James

[Mik James]

I Spent ages back in the day on TTLG looking for a capable monitor that could do deep blacks, but thus far only AMOLED/OLED has come close to CRT. So this will be interesting.

Plasma was very close. If I could find a 2013 Panasonic around here on the used market i'd probably have bought it instead of the PicoPro. The entry level 42st60 was only ~600$ when it was selling new. Some worry of image retention if precautions weren't taken though.

 

There was also the Pioneer elite models back in 2009, much pricier though

Or the Jvc projectors that hit the market around the same time.

Or even high end local dimming Lcd's.

 

Lot's of options for rich people, I dragged in a Hitachi 51uwx20b crt rear projection for a awhile. It wasn't great for high contrast detail though, to many stray reflections.

Edited April 16, 2015 by Mik James

[Mik James]

Just arrived today. Ill wait until nightfall to commence with my thievery under the cover of darkness

[Bikerdude]

Nice, detailed review please :-)

[Mik James]

Didn't actually get to playing the dark mod with this. I haven't had anything thief installed lately due to the lack of a suitable display. This does not appear to fill that niche.

I watched Star Trek Into Darkness and played some elder scrolls 4 and 5 as well as Styx master of shadows.

 

Let's start with the bad, unfortunately there's plenty of it

 

1) Dark scenes appear to exhibit a lot of posterization on the pico pro, it makes everything look like the good old software mode back in the original thief game for those who didn't have 3d acceleration on their gpu.

I tried both rgb full and rgb limited in the and graphics settings and the effect is still there.

 

2) The contrast and sharpness are not comparable to oled. Their is a softness to the image, which I believe is due to low ansi contrast. Fine dark details in brighter areas of a displayed image are not as pronounced as they should be.

 

3) Laser speckle is noticeable if you look for within brighter parts of the image.

A finer screen texture appears to help along with a pure white surface to project on, however this will limit contrast on screen in an untreated room.

 

4) The lasers require alignment, similar to crt, except with the pico pro there are 2 red beams and 2 green beams that need to be aligned as well as the blue beam. A pain to get excellent alignment to say the least.

 

5) The laser light aperture is rated 3r, which makes me a little uneasy about accidentally looking into the beam.

 

The good:

 

1) The image is plenty bright for me in a dark room at about 50-60" with a white surface.

2) Motion clarity is very good as far as I can tell

3) It's portable and silent.

4) No color trailing/phosphor lag/rainbows.

5) No visible pixel structure

 

The verdict:

I really hope someone can prove me wrong about the posterization, as that was the final nail in the coffin for me.

Even if the posterization can be worked around, you shouldn't buy this expecting a pocketable oled screen. It is no where near as sharp, and front projection requires a treated dark walled room to achieve the same sort of contrast a flat panel or rear projection setup can offer, especially on the white surface this requires for reasonable brightness.

Edited May 3, 2015 by Mik James

[nbohr1more]

Sounds like you're hitting some sorta precision limit at the low end of the brightness scale.

 

Have you tried cranking-up the source brightness and gamma in your video drivers then adjusting the brightness at the projector level

to correct?

[Mik James]

The pico pro has no adjustments. Ill play around with it some more and see what I can figure out though.

[Mik James]

Figured out very little, bought a f5300b plasma on sale for 460$ taxes in

My opinion on the picopro is it just doesn't deliver for image quality, but I did pay an extra 200$ for it in Canada so it might be worth it to those who can easily return it.