Gaming on a UST projector can be better than any flatscreen. ***UPDATE - It can, indeed display low res content natively***

Video Games
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I really didn’t know what to expect when a buddy of mine brought over is UST projector for a gaming session. He’s running a device called “Formovie Theatre” and, while it did have some input lag (40ms), it makes me very optimistic for the future of extra large screen gaming. Other models are, apparently, just as good as this one but also have a more appropriate gaming response time of under 20ms.

Let me run through the specs of the model I played on and then I’ll get to my overall impressions:

4k native
HDR and Dolby Vision compatible
VRR in game mode

All of this was displaying on my white painted dry wall with some spackling visible since we just moved. But he plays on a CLR screen which diverts ambient light at his place and he assures me it’s basically perfect during daylight conditions as well on that setup.

Nevertheless, even with the 40ms of input lag and no canvas screen, plus a bit of ambient daytime light, this was an experience that I will never forget.

Switch and PS5 both looked incredible on it. Blacks were black, colors were deep and rich like an OLED display, visuals were sharp as a flat screen but so much larger, and for low res content it upscaled more cleanly than what I’ve seen on my LG OLED.

It seems that the display is almost CRT-like, providing a free anti-aliasing effect when displaying sub-4k content. With that said, text and pixels were still sharp. And even though the display was over 100 inches big, there was no screen door effect when inspecting the “pixels” up close.

I was very shocked by that.

It also appeared to pan smoothly with less stutter than an OLED at 30fps but not quite as perfect as a CRT.

Overall, if you can get one that has good input lag and play in good lighting conditions, I really do think this fully beats out OLED as a more enjoyable experience. And I never would have expected to say that.

It’s hard to capture, but here’s a few photos I snapped:

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Projection is cool. I use one at 120 inch for movies. I never game on it though dispite it having perfectly acceptable input lag.

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Holy crap Sonic looks fantastic.

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A friend has a simlar spec DLP short throw laser projector and yeah they are incredibly good, I too was absolutely stunned the first time I saw it even though it was in daylight. But you pay a significant sum for that quality, he put in north of £3k which I really can’t justify as much as I would love to watch sports, movies and games on screen that large and of that quality.

Probaly a DLP, they have screen door but it’s nowhere near as thick as on a LCD projector, I couldn’t notice it on my friends setup either.

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I have a UST LCD Epson projector. Meant for business meetings, so lacks some features of the home models. It’s great.

The most difficult aspect is mounting it to ensure the image is not skewed or trapezoid, which would require processing to resolve which in turn affects image quality and input lag, though my projector has auto adjustment along with fast and slow image resampling settings to help with this.

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It does. And the crazy thing is, like taking pics of a CRT, it’s actually hard to capture just how good it looks in person. The colors and clarity is even better live than in the photo.

Plus, this is on drywall. Once he installs the screen it’ll be even better.

It’s truly nuts

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That’s just for the projector at this quality. To get the right screen is another 2k if you want to use it the way it was meant to be seen

But if you have a huge room and really want the size, an OLED at the same size would be north of 20k. In that sense, it’s the best size to price deal you can get for a display. Even low quality LCDs will cost a lot.

It’s rated as a 150” display and given the sharpness at 120 inches, I do believe it can reach that size without sacrificing quality.

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Yeah OLED’s value beyond 60 or so inches gets worse and worse the bigger they are, agree that for the price a projector is a better option.

Personally I’m looking in the £500 - 600 range with a £200 screen lol, I won’t get anything like the quality of this high end stuff but I still think it will good enough to enjoy F1 or a 1080p film on.

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I have a “traditional” back of the room projector that I use for movies and sports (Epson 5040 off eBay). Lag ain’t bad and with some adjusting it looks really great even when that lights are on. I’ve hooked the MiSTer up a few times and it’s a trip!!

I don’t use it for gaming very much, but it’s amazing for movies after getting it dialed in. I have good light control so I’d rather watch a 4k disc in there than see a movie at a theatre. I have a 135 inch screen from Silver Ticket.

I think a UST is a viable AND interesting non traditional way of watching and gaming in the future, maybe w/o the classic way normal folks often design rooms around a screen. I think one is in MY future for sure :slight_smile: That Sonic shot looks phenomenal and I know it looks even better IRL!

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So I had to give this a bump since I visited my buddy and made a discovery playing Switch on his UST.

There are scaling options for low resolution content, and one of the choices is something called “Unscaled”…

:thinking:

Obviously, this had me intrigued. This is a 4k-native projector so I assumed that this meant it would offer a true integer scale to 4k as opposed to an interpolated scale to 4k.

Delightfully, I’m wrong. Instead, it actually offers the content in NATIVE RESOLUTION windowed within a 4k frame buffer with the unused pixels blanked out.

So that means, when you select this mode, you see the Switch’s 1080p output in a smaller window centered within the 4k frame with exactly 1920x1080 pixels being used. The rest of the 4k pixels are simply turned off as a blank boarder.

When you select 720p in the Switch’s settings, the image gets smaller. When you select 480p, the image gets even smaller so that you’re only seeing the native pixels.

But you may be thinking, “Peltz, what the hell use is having a native res image if it’s rendered the size of a postage stamp?”

Well, that’s where we get into the true beauty of this discovery. Because this is a projector, you can simply move the device further away from the wall, and the image can be as large as you want it to be at whatever resolution you may be projecting.

Boom.

You can have a perfect native 480p image at 60+ inches by doing this.

I have not tried a 15khz signal (i.e. 240p/480i) since I have no device capable of converting that into HDMI which is the only connection type that the projector can accept.

But for 480p up to 4k gaming, I’ve confirmed you can do so natively with RAZOR SHARP visuals as long as you don’t mind physically moving the device to get the perfect sized image.

Now with that said, moving the device and having it perfectly aligned with the screen is no simple task. If it’s sitting on top of a media unit, you’ll have to move the entire media unit.

But folks… if you can find the right table (ideally a motorized height-adjustable standing desk with castors that can lock in place), this is basically like having a retrotink 4k built right into the device. And in game mode, the system is acceptably responsive even if not at the LG OLED or CRT levels to which most of us are accustomed.

I really wish I could test this out with 15khz content, because if it can recognize sub 480p signals properly, this could be a really faithful way to play the lowest res content at very large sizes.

Perhaps in the age of a retrotink4k, this isn’t as big of a discovery as it would have been 2-3 years ago. But I still think this is a really cool feature that I never expected to see in a consumer display.

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The big issue with this is as you move it back and less of the display pixels are actually active, you loose a huge amount of brightness and contrast by blowing up the remaining window.

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I’m sure that’s true. You can likely adjust the settings to compensate though. We were running at 50% brightness and 40% contrast and the image was still super bright in a dim room.

With that said, even if you don’t move the projector, it’s still likely to be larger in size than a 20” CRT when boarded. It’s not a bad option if you don’t mind sitting close.

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Peltz I think you could find some lower res high quality projectors that are also amazing for retro gaming pretty cheaply. I had a thrift store 800x600 Epson that had component and svideo on it that I used to watch VHS… I bet it’d be kick ass for old games!

UST seems to be pretty newish but I bet you could find cool stuff that could be pretty exciting if you were open to traditional back of the room projection.

Maybe there is already a database of projectors/lag times and I’m just ignorant of the niche.

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I know My Life in Gaming did an episode on this. I should probably give it a re-watch now that I’ve experience an UST.