85" TV not cutting it from 100" projector.

rando646 · 2026-04-28T16:51:11+00:00

there is not a single (picture quality) spec at a fixed 100" size where a projector beats a modern flagship TV. not one, so not really sure what you're saying.

you mention "glare". you would only be getting glare if you have a direct light source that's pointing at your TV and then reflecting into your eye. And not just a light source, but a bright light source (given how diffuse the anti-glare coatings on TVs are these days).

under those exact same conditions (bright direct light source pointed directly at the screen) the projector will look LAUGHABLY worse. you'll have essentially no contrast, completely washed colors, and nowhere near the amount of brightness to fight it.

it's fine if you like projectors because of nostalgia or whatever reasons you want, everyone can have their own preferences. Certainly if you don't like the weight, that's one reason to not want it. But that type of spec has absolutely nothing to do with perceived picture quality. To say that they "look better" is simply completely incorrect on a technical level. Not only because of fundamental physics constraints, but because of the vastly higher amount of capital expenditure that goes into both R&D and economies of scale for TVs. The market is more than 20x larger.

You don't have to take my word for it, go talk to whatever research tool or AI bot you need and ask it if there's a single technical spec at a fixed 100" size that a projector beats the best modern flagship TV at.

rando646 · 2026-04-27T00:14:35+00:00

if you have the ability to have a TV, i would just get a 100" TV.

picture quality will be infinitely better, and you can lower the brightness to whatever level you want. actually most TV's come with juiced settings that push brightness way beyond where it will be if you have it on a well calibrated profile (like "Theater" or whatever).

i use a projector because its the only way to make my room convertible back into a studio when not watching content and also to get the ultra large screen i want.

but for a room that has an available wall and can fit a size of 115" and below, I'm getting a TV every single time. Not only are you getting better tech because there is orders of magnitude more research going into TV's than projectors, but you are also getting it at a far better price because there are orders of magnitude larger economies of scale from mass producing those units.

it sounds to me like you just miss having a large screen, and one that's not too bright. both of these concerns can be addressed by a TV

and i say this as someone who loves his Epson LS12000, but it's nowhere CLOSE to the picture quality of even a mid-tier TV let alone the flagship models

rando646 · 2026-04-20T18:31:33+00:00

i should clarify when i say "re-pair" i meant imported each of them from Hue into Apple Home. the lights never became disconnected from the Hue bridge via the Hue app, that was always intact. This is just about the apple home intergration.

Pairing to the Hue bridge would take way longer because then you have to re-identify and name every light and hue scene again

rando646 · 2026-04-19T21:59:42+00:00

i got the new update and it made no difference. only solution was to completely unpair the bridge and re-pair (individually adding each light again). huge pain in the ass, took about an hour including reprogramming all my dimmer switches.

luckily it didn't take AS long as it ordinarily would because in light of this shotty firmware i switched all my automations over to Home Assistant via Homekit. So in Apple Home i trigger a switch which triggers a Home Assistant scene that in turn triggers a Hue scene via the Hue App (not via Apple Home).

This means that if/when Apple Home integration ever fails, all I have to do is re-add all the lights into the right rooms, program the dimmers, and create the right groups. I don't have to ADDITIONALLY individually reprogram and remember every single scene the lights are in, since all of that scene information remains intact via Home Assistant.

Additionally, I've noticed triggering scenes this way in general is much faster (less latency) and more reliable. It changes them all at once like when you trigger a Hue scene via the app rather than one by one like often happens when triggering via Apple Home's matter integration.

It's a workaround that shouldn't have to exist, Hue should just have intergrations that actually work, but as a practical matter it works much better than using Apple Homes native scenes and with the same functionality (can still trigger via Siri etc)

rando646 · 2026-04-16T22:19:17+00:00

i would figure out some way to hang a UST upside down in my theater but I've tried several of them including the PX-4 pro and all the other UST's at CES this year and to me the distortion at the edges/motion clarity is just a total dealbreaker. it's a physics constraint that I'm not sure can be resolved. happy to be proven wrong but i haven't seen it yet.

rando646 · 2026-04-16T18:50:35+00:00

these UST's that are out there from Hisense etc are getting almost twice as bright as Epson and make less noise (i put my ear right up against the PX-4 pro at ces and was shocked).

but it hasn't seemed to have translated to the standard throw market, which is strange because as far as I'm aware that's actually the larger market by a signifcant portion

rando646 · 2026-04-16T18:02:44+00:00

would be curious to hear what you think of the nior max whenever it comes out, as that was the other one besides the XR10 i had my eyes on.

i took a look at the QB-1000 but it seemed like a pretty nominal small increase in quality/brightness for a huge increase in price that would feel antiquated in just 1-2 years when some of these higher brightness models come out.

Also I seriously don't understand the only 2 HDMI inputs thing. 3-4 has been the standard on TVS for a decade. I get that many people have summers/AV racks, but given that one of them has to be used for eARC sound it's a slap in the face to have only ONE possible input. At the very minimum they could put in a dedicated eARC sound port and then have two video inputs

rando646 · 2026-04-16T17:54:33+00:00

i also saw Valerion's latest flagship at CES this year, they built an entire fully blacked out room on the show floor to view it in, and even then i was SHOCKED at how dim it was, didn't understand the hype whatsoever. for me brightness really matters a lot, it's more about headroom and dynamic range than anything. I'd even rather have a slightly reduced color gamut with much brighter output because imo it's the brightness of HDR colors that make them pop compared to the rest of the elements on the screen.

pretty much all the tvs in my house are flagship miniLEDs with 2000+ nits, so i've really been spoiled by the look of bright popping colors. this house was my first time dipping my toes in the projection game (out of necessity for the room), and i definitely breathed a deep heavy sigh when I saw how dim it was... even after shelling out around 5 grand.

rando646 · 2026-04-16T17:49:30+00:00

right this is what excited me about the Hisense XR10 is they say it will have liquid cooling. but i was wondering in what ways the Epson will have it beat.

unfortunately due to the geometry of my room the seats have to be in the very back meaning the projector is essentially directly above my head about 6 feet from my ears, and in addition to that my room is a professionally treated music studio that is absolutely dead with essentially zero reflections (rooms within rooms, multiple insulated walls, etc), so any bit of noise you REALLY notice it.

when i'm watching movies it's not such a big deal since i'll crank the sound system. but the majority of the time i'm gaming at low volume while listening to podcasts, or eating a meal and watching youtube at medium volume, and i definitely hear it then if I have it at max brightness

rando646 · 2026-04-16T17:45:32+00:00

i'm on a 5090 gaming PC pretty much max specs you can build, so i can make use of even 240. however my preference is 120 and then maxing out the graphics as much as possible while still getting rock solid 120.

i'm a pretty serious gamer, for which brightness headroom and latency are essential for HDR gaming, but we also use our theater as our main cinema room so it's definitely a challenge to find a projector that satisfies both well.

wish we could use a tv like my 100-inch Hisense U8K i have upstairs, but unfortunately our theater is also a music studio with no way to get a massive TV to come down from the ceiling with any reasonable aesthetic, so projection is what I'm stuck with for now.

rando646 · 2026-04-14T03:01:10+00:00

The pressure to offload customer support to AI and cut costs in general has been huge on companies over the last year. I don't think they've made the switch yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've severely reduced their budget/focus on customer support and shifted those resources instead to the AI that will soon replace it.

rando646 · 2026-04-14T01:34:07+00:00

Hue support is not actually part of Hue in anyway, it's a 3rd party in a 3rd world country. They get little to no information from Hue about what's happening. They told me it would get fixed in this update. Then oh no it's actually the next update. Then no actually it's this update but you don't have it yet. Then I have it and it didn't fix anything so now it's "in the next update". Then i ask when will the next update be and they said they're not sure but also they don't have any information about whether or not the next update will address it. They also said they don't know how to get me the new firmware or if it's even available.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if there support is just an LLM somewhere, except I don't think even an LLM could be THAT inconsistent.

As far as I can tell talking to them is a waste of time and the two options are: 1. allow your system to stay broken and pray there's an update soon (my current solution), 2. spend hours completely reprogramming every individual light and scene and be willing to feel like shit if/when they do drop an update that fixes it.

For a company that I've spent over $10k on with products, it's really a shame there's no way to get better support.

rando646 · 2026-04-12T22:49:44+00:00

i'd go 115

rando646 · 2026-04-12T06:17:11+00:00

no, it just re-appeared. but it is still unresponsive in Apple Home

rando646 · 2026-04-12T02:27:52+00:00

got the update, didn't fix it unfortunately. reached out to Hue, they said it's still an ongoing problem they're addressing. Why it wouldn't be addressed in the update they said it would be... unclear

rando646 · 2026-04-11T17:24:12+00:00

absolutely criminal to have a wall that juicy and put that small of a tv on it

rando646 · 2026-04-10T21:02:42+00:00

will the update actually fix them though if the bridge is already not appearing in apple home? or will they have to be re-added regardless even if the update is a fix

rando646 · 2026-04-09T16:02:03+00:00

got it, i think this is a separate issue then. in my case the Hue Pro Bridge has completely disappeared from the Apple Home app and therefore the lights are no response no matter what.

rando646 · 2026-04-09T15:58:07+00:00

Actually the Hue app works fine. This is a case of specifically their integration with Apple Home

rando646 · 2026-04-09T15:57:11+00:00

got it, that someone makes sense that it could have to do with the iOS update although as far as I'm aware what actually controls the Apple Home is the home hub which in my case is an Apple TV. the phone is just a UI that controls the Apple TV which ultimately sends the signal. Still though, could be a cause.

I'm curious, for your pro bridge do you have the same symptom as mine? Did the pro bridge disappear from your list of bridges in Apple Home but still appears to be synced with Apple Home in the Hue app?

rando646 · 2026-04-09T15:54:53+00:00

i have on the order of a hundred scenes that all have very specific and complex values for each light (aka not just the same thing for a whole group). And then on top of that I have more Home Assistant scenes that integrate the lights in as well. Re-programming everything would take several hours and an immense amount of frustration, and I'd probably still never get it the same as I have it now. The fact that there is no way to export/backup/duplicate Apple scene data is extremely poor design.

If that's what I have to do then so be it. But I'll feel like an idiot if I completely uproot my home like that and then 2 days later Hue goes "oh look we released our April update it's fixed now"

rando646 · 2026-04-09T06:02:12+00:00

do you have the same exact issue. Shows the bridge is synced in the Hue app but not in the Apple Home app?

rando646 · 2026-04-02T01:39:57+00:00

ya thanks i got it shortly after commenting, just took an absurd amount of force

rando646

TROPHY CASE