I know there are a lot of backers who have yet to receive their PPM, have been watching the resolution comments with some interest, are on the fence about trying to get a refund, etc. I was once in the same place with the disaster that was the Eve V Laptop. As I have had my unit a week now, I thought I would add some firsthand experience comments instead of “detail speculation”…
First off, I am a quite savvy person with technology and projection, but not a full blown expert. My uncle had one of the very first generation home theater projectors with the three separate color emitters. I have used very high end projectors in classroom and auditorium type settings, but the PPM is actually the first one I have spent my own money on.
I’m currently projecting onto my bedroom wall, onto a non-white, barely textured, very matte painted surface. Image size is about 2.8m, viewed from maybe 2.5m away. Suboptimal in many respects, but it has helped me see what this thing can and can’t do.
Brightness is plenty for a room dark enough to be hard to walk in, even in eco mode. Makes the Nebula line look positively dull and dim by comparison. Presentation mode is bright enough for a room with medium weight curtains closed, even with light spilling around them from a fully sunny Colorado day at 2100m elevation. Yes, you will lose some contrast and gain some fan noise in those conditions, but both of those will drop below notice in less than a minute. Open the curtains and the image is almost unusable to even navigate menus by, until you bring the image size down to say less than 1 m. At .5m size the image is plenty contrasty even in the brightest room I have on my house. There is a halo of light spilling around the projected image quite far in all four directions, but that is probably better for eye health in the very dark room setting anyway.
As to resolution, the lower resolution emitter plus pixel shift is not at all an issue except in a few specific cases. As an example of how good it is, I put up the same x265 encoded ~3GB file size BR rip of the movie Gravity in VLC on both the PPM and my old 1920x1080 screen laptop. On the scenes with the ISS station where Dr. Stone is tangled in the parachute lines, you can see exactly the same level of detail in the PPM image and on the laptop.
Where the pixel shift might be objectionable is very very fast action, such as sword play scenes or when punches are being thrown very near to the camera. In this case it appears the PPM GPU can’t keep up and drops the highly changing frames, and the pixel shift drawing style exacerbates the issue. It’s almost like inverse motion blur or rolling shutter effect, where the edges are too detailed but the middle of the motion doesn’t seem “solid”. Watching the opening credits to DaVinci’s Demons, with it’s “flipbook animation with dancing errors” visual style is somehow unnerving on the PPM in a way that it definitely is not on the laptop…
I am able to focus the unit using auto to get good crispness and it usually only takes one button press of further manual adjustment to get the image to crazy crispness, both center and edge. As in I can see individual hairs on actors’ heads crispness. However, consistency of areas of the same color is a bit of an issue, especially with whites and strong highlights. There’s a regular rectangular blocky pattern visible there, like the white is a brick wall built with bright marble bricks and dull sandstone bricks. It’s objectionable if you focus on it, but does not ruin the viewing experience if you are truly watching the whole scene. Keep in mind I am projecting to a very large image size, and this effect decreases greatly when you reduce the image size below 2m or so. Still, I would like to see this worked on on further Software Updates and image calibration efforts in the future.
Subtitles look very pixelated, jagged, and blocky in pretty much every app I have tried. Text in menus is fairly similar. I don’t notice it so much when screen mirroring a text document from Android, however, so I suspect this is a software issue that could be solved with anti-aliasing on the OS level.
Colors are good and strong, plenty of saturation and range, but will suffer greatly with poor quality videos. As in, good video is so vibrant you will notice when a video is shot with poor coloring…
If you are expecting this unit to be an IMAX in a box, or compete with the 4K Laser projectors from LG, think again. But for the cost, size, weight, I am quite happy with the image quality and truly enjoy watching my favorite titles on this projector. I do have one show stopper level issue that I have documented in another thread here, but if this can be fixed I will be quite happy to call the PPM well worth the money.
If there is anything else you have questions about, or someone really needs specifically reviewed or tested, let me know and I’ll try to get to it.
Thanks
- DH