Sanyo PLV-Z5 for passive setup?

[art]

Hi,

I have Sanyo PLV-Z5 LCD projector and I would like to know if I could use it for passive 3D projection.
I tested with cheap sun glasses that it's green color is polarized to 90 degrees and red and blue colors
are polarized to 0 degrees.

What you think, should I bought another projector and start to build passive 3D setup?

[Likay]

You need two projectors and a polarizationpreserving screen for a passive setup. Your projector seems similar to mine regarding polarizationangles and it works fine using ordinary polarizers or even better stereopol filters specially for lcd-beamers. Stereopol filters are very expensive but gives almost twice as much light as ordinary polarizers. Since the colors from your projectors are aligned 0/90° you need to use 45/135° filters and glasses. If the filters are aligned 45° from the polarization of the beamers you will not have any noticeable colortint.
Regardless: With two of these beamers and cheap polarizers you'll get at least twice as much light as with shutters and similar projectors. It's also compatible with just anything but not 3d-vision. Contradicting.

Another and cheaper option should be looking into a shutterglasses compatible projector and shutters. But then there are drivers....

[art]

I suppose stereopol filter is same as SPAR filter? Do you have any approximate cost for those?

Never used any shutterglass setup, but I think that flickering could be problem with it. I first thought to buy IZ3D monitor, but couldnt find it with reasonable price in europe. So after I saw few 3D movies in movie theather, I had to get same kind of 3D setup to my home

[Likay]

I know what you mean. After gaming some time with a couple of e-dims i got caught on 3d on a big screen experience at a theme park! And now there's no way back!

About spars you're right: SPAR=StereoPolfilter with AntiReflective coating

I don't know a recent price for those since it was a couple of years ago i got them. I bought mine from silverfabric (now named awater3d). http://www.awater3d.com/filter/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; At the time i bought mine they were about 800 euros a pair but they're fully worth it considering the doubling of lightintensity they gives. The Sanyo only gives 1100 lumen which should be enough in a darker room and a 100" screen. With ordinary polarizers i would think the image might be a little dark.
As a comparison a 2000 ansilumen projector through one SPAR gives the same brightness from a 100" screen as from an lcd-monitor.
I would suggest starting with ordinary polarizers first to get familiar with the setup. If you have trouble finding polarizing film you can easily find it in a used up/broken lcd-monitor. Regarding silverscreen it's different. I would suggest go for a proper one with decent quality since this is the most crucial part of a passive rig. Sharky has a review on a few screens and i think you maybe seen it?
One advantage of the projectors you're gonna use is the internal lenseshift. This allows you to adjust the keystone without loosing resolution. Mine has digital keystone. Not a big issue at all but it would be fun to have everything fully optimized.

[sharky]

hi guys!

awater3d is not silverfabric. monika awater is the main developer of silverfabric's material called "silverfabric". then they split and now awater has her own shop. both the shops sell filters i think.

i got my spar filters from silverfabric around 10 months ago for 530 euro each..

[Likay]

Thanks for clarification. When searching for the link i discovered that silverfabric.de took me to an emty address and then assumed silverfabric changed their name to awater3d.
Silverfabrics address is now is http://www.silverfabric3d.de/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.
My bad.

[art]

I also tought that silverfabric were renamed to awater3d. Well good to know that.

Ok, I ordered another Z5, that is discontinued model so I hope that store can still get it. I also ordered filters and few glasses from Berezin, those were quite cheap about 60 dollars.

I sent email to Peroni about their silverscreen, but I havent got any reply yet. Sharky, how you got screen from them for your review?

Has anyone tested Da-Lite 3D Virtual Grey screens?

[art]

Couldn't get new Z5, but I managed to find used projector with good price. I never got any answer from Peroni. I suppose they just want to sell huge amounts of their screen material to big clients. So I ordered screen from Screenlux, they make screens that are meant to be used in daylight. I report later how well it works with 3D.

Now that I have all needed equipment I can start to build my 3D setup

[Likay]

Just ask if there's something you need to find out on the way. It isn't really that difficult to get it going once you figured it out. I sometimes take my rig for parties etc and setting it up now with different alignments on every place takes only 10 minutes of tuning before i'm finished and the image is good.

[topi]

Instead of making a new topic I'll just post this here..

I've been thinking of going passive 3D and this is my first projector project ever, so I thought I finally found enough information to get things started, but then I see this: "Since the colors from your projectors are aligned 0/90° you need to use 45/135° filters and glasses. If the filters are aligned 45° from the polarization..." Whaaaat?

So do I now have to find a particular projector and find about these angles whatever they are? Is there any restrictions about selecting the 2 projectors? I thought that passive could use whatever as long as they were identical. Very confusing. And thought I'd buy the filters from silverfabric and it would be alright, but do I really have to use keystone to make things right? What I've gathered is that keystone messes up the picture in normal use and should be avoided at all costs, and if the picture is wrong, use lens shift or change the position of the projector.

And about the silverscreen material. Do I buy a piece of plywood and nail the silverscreen material, wherever that can be found, to that or does it come with the frame or what? All of the information seems to be scattered around and no clear answers to be found. My head is a mess with all this stuff and so seem to be the pages from where to actually buy that stuff. Would have liked the one from Peroni as well since it was recommended in the Sharkys silverscreen review.

[Likay]

Instead of making a new topic I'll just post this here..

I've been thinking of going passive 3D and this is my first projector project ever, so I thought I finally found enough information to get things started, but then I see this: "Since the colors from your projectors are aligned 0/90° you need to use 45/135° filters and glasses. If the filters are aligned 45° from the polarization..." Whaaaat?

Hi and welcome!

This is technical info but it's important in the choice of going 0/90° or 45/135° with a passive rig and LCD-projectors.
Why? Lcd-projectors already have an internal polarization and on top of that the colors are not even having the same polarization! Let's say two colors share one polarization (for example 0°) and the remaning color have 90°. If your polarizer is aligned either 0° or 90° it will kill some of the colors from the projector. If the polarizer instead is aligned 45° or 135° all colors slips through equally. You get a slight loss of intensity but it's is similar to a dlp-projector passive setup because the light from dlp's have no polarization alignment. Spar-filters (lcd-projectors only!) have retarderlayers which aligns all colors before they get to the final polarizer which means that you'll have a very high light throughput.
If you're aware of how this works you can easily try using ordinary polarizers for a start, even with lcd-projectors! You can easily upgrade to stereopol filters later on if you feel need of extra light which is not possible with dlp's.

Projectors being the same? This is important! If the alignment of pixels differ because of different optics properties of the projectors you may get strange phenomenas. These are specially noticed when viewing 2d but if the phenomenas aren't too big, then 3d is very forgiving in reproduction. Less visible in 3d in other words.

To find out your projectors polarization of lcd's? Most probably they are 0/90° from the beginning. If you want to check:
If you have, it's easiest to use a couple of polarized glasses where you already know the polarization angles. Hold the glasses in front of the projectorlense and look at the screen image. Either you get a full color (no colors killed) view when the glasses are straight or when you turned them 45° in either direction. If you get a full color view when the glasses are STRAIGHT then the glasses you have are the ones to use!
If you don't know the polarization angle of the polarization filters/glasses it's still possible to determine for as long as you have at least two filters but it's tricky to explain how: Hold both filters in front of you and rotate one of them until they block entirely. Then turn one filter without rotating any of them. The closer to 0°/90° you have the less difference you'll see in blocking and the closer to 45°/135° the bigger difference you'll see.

You'll get no polarization phenomenas when using dlp-projectors but you can also not use special spar-filters either (which means a steady 55% light loss using dlp's). However: even using dlp's you get twice as much light as when using shutters because of the two projectors! Lcd's and ordinary filters matches dlp's in lightemission but as said: filters needs to have the right alignment (most probably 45°/135°) to maintain colorreproduction. Lcd's and spar-filterss have a light throughput up to 85% (15% loss) which gives almost twice as much light as when using standard polarizers.

Regarding keystone you're partially right (in regards it doesn't totally messes up the image ): When mounting projectors and not having them totally right in height the picture shown is trapetzoid. To correct this you need lenseshift or keystone correction.
Lenseshift works in a mechanical way to adjust til the picture is a perfect rectangle.
Keystone correction is made digitally which means that the image is increasingly scaled vertically to make a perfect form. Since nothing in the projector is moved mechanically this can only be done by reducing the pixels. This will result in 1: Less resolution and 2: phenomenas where the picture becomes blurry because of the keystone algoritm.
My projectors don't have lenseshift (but i wish they had) so i have to stay with keystone correction.
Without keystone correction the flat picture in 3D will look scewed, like a bent paper. However: when turning on 3d this effect is experienced less because of the depth in 3d-image. The closer the lenses are to each other, the smaller this phenomena becomes. With keystone and lenseshift you can correct this to a good rectangular image on both screens (resulting a perfectly shaped and not scewed image).
Myself i prefer a keystone corrected image instead of without but to reduce aliasing phenomenas i play my games in a higher resolution than the native resolution of the projectors. This reduces the experienced blurriness of the projectors keystone because the projectors now also have to scale the image. In my case using 1280x960 gives a great image even if the native resolution of projectors are 1024x768. The alignment of the projectors i have now gives a keystonevalue of -2% on one and +4% on the other projector so it's probably as good as it can get anyway.

Regarding silverscreen: Check with the homepages of different screenmakers. Most of them sells the screens with frames but this usually costs quite a sum. So i decided to make my own solution and only buy the pure screenmaterial.
Tip: Don't do what i did from the beginning in the eager to make it work! I nailed it up on the wall using pins which of course in notime resulted in a dropdown with permanent wrinkles...
Different screens has different mechanical properties (check Sharky's thread) and can be mounted different. I'm using a silverfabric silverscreen attached to a rollercurtain which i roll up and down on a tube. It works for me but this screen might have to be stretched to look good (Sharky has the same and had to while i manage without). There are also paints but i have personally no experience of them.

[art]

Resurecting this old thread.

At the moment I have this setup working:
2x PLV-Z5
Screenlux silver screen
45/135 polarizing filter front of projector
+ few polarizing glasses

This works great, but I have been thinking if I could modify projectors so I wouldnt have to use filter in front of projectors.

In these projectors green color is polarized vertically and blue & red are horizontally. Does anyone know why? Just wondering if there is some technical reason for this, because if not I could change polarization filters inside of projectors.

[art]

While I have been thinking about changing polarization filter inside the projectors I started to think why we couldnt do this with software.

I could set one of projectors horizontaly and another verticaly. This way I would have each color polorized vertically and horizontally. Next step would be found a way to send each color to right output:

Left eye signal -> green -> projector 1
-> blue -> projector 2
-> red -> projectror 2

Right eye signal -> green - projector 2
-> blue -> projector 1
-> red -> projector 1

What you think, could this work? I have iz3d drivers, but I dont think there is support for this?

[cybereality]

Interesting idea. I don't think you can do that with iz3D, but it would be cool if you could.

[Likay]

While I have been thinking about changing polarization filter inside the projectors I started to think why we couldnt do this with software.

I could set one of projectors horizontaly and another verticaly. This way I would have each color polorized vertically and horizontally. Next step would be found a way to send each color to right output:

Left eye signal -> green -> projector 1
-> blue -> projector 2
-> red -> projectror 2

Right eye signal -> green - projector 2
-> blue -> projector 1
-> red -> projector 1

What you think, could this work? I have iz3d drivers, but I dont think there is support for this?

What you describe is almost the same as the stereobright solution. If you're not too picky you can approach this in an easier way by using quarterwave retarders without the need to rotate one projector. These are very cheap (much cheaper than plastic polarizers) once you find them. By aligning a retarder in front (or inside) of each projector, one at 45° and the other at 135°, the result is circular polarization with the properties you describe above. I don't know if it's possible to use qw-retarders inside a pj but they are definitely not as sensitive for radiation as plastic polarizers.
Regular circular 3d-glasses can be used for viewers(real-d and most glasses for passive-3d tv-sets). There is one hook: The ghostingrejection will be quite bad (probably even a tad worse than using circular filters) and a silverscreen is still needed. Stereoscopic player supports stereobright (iz3d or any other gaming 3d-drivers does not) and i haven't bothered checking other softs.
Aligning is more crucial than a standard dual-pj-setup since each eyes final image is created by two projectors.

A way to try if it works by rotating one pj as the example above you could just try rotate one display in the displaydriver and use the stereobright option in stereoscopic player. It worked softwarewise when i made a quick try (so to say) but i didn't mess with any alignments. Resizing is most probably also needed.

[art]

On second thought this wouldnt work, because I could not install second projector vertically (resolution etc).

I have been reading service manual of plv-z5 and I can see that there is polarization filters before and after LCD panels. I suppose it there is some reason why colors are alinged this way and changing only those filters wouldnt help.

Stereobright seems quite intresting solution, although I would prefer less ghosting even if it means less brightness. So I think i have to stay with my 45/135 linear filter setup.

[Likay]

I use nvidia and i can rotate one projector in the nvidiapanel and have it working with the iz3d-driver. I didn't bother trying to adjust the projectors to match though.

You asked before about why the polarization is the way it is on lcd-projectors. I'm guessing now but i think it's because all lcd-beamers work after the same principle with dichroic semireflective mirrors which due to the principle causes polarization. The lcd-panels themselves must have polarized light to function correctly and somehow they probably get different polarized light after the dichroic filters/mirrors. As said, i'm only guessing but all lcd's seems to share the same polarizationproperties (red+blue one pol and green 90° rotated).
About preference stereobright and standard polarizers i prefer linear filters due to better, sharper image and way better ghosting rejection. It's just an easy experiment to make if you have access to qw-retarder film.