No, I haven’t… Yours is the first comment in quite a while about it. Let’s hope your fix works If not, try AVSforum.com – there’s a lot of regular traffic for most projectors, and they love to beat on manufacturers for problems, and try to solve them themselves too.

Any number of companies do the same thing. Epson’s another, for one, and I can count at least 2 other Japanese companies with separate operations in US and Canada, and won’t I was of the In other words, Mits in Canada, is a separate company than Mits in the US. Yes, they both buy their projectors from Japan, as do the operations in other continents. The China and Taiwan manufacturers don’t seem to be as organized, being relatively late to the game and much smaller in market share.

I think they all discourage, or forbid such sales, and normally their big online dealers obey such things, but, when you also sell to distributors, who in turn supply the 2nd tier and the smaller dealers, there will always be a problem (not to say all the big direct dealers always behave).
Now that you have brought this up, when I get a chance, I’ll try to do a blog specific to the issue… Of course most companies (manufacturers) are clear in their warranty pages, on their sites, about this whole thing, but then who reads warranty stuff.

ON my site, the warranty page is by far the shortest, but gets only read by about 1 in 9 people who visit the first page of a review, 1 in seven vs. the image quality and summary pages. No other page in a review gets less than 2x the page views (even calibration).

When I was a dealer, we probably sold a couple hundred home theater projectors to Canadians, but would only ship in the US. Those folks all knew the story, had a friend or relative in the states, and knew they would have to ship it back to their friend, etc. to handle the warranty issue. The invoice almost certainly would have to show a shipping address in the US, but, the owner, probably could be anywhere (and that shown on the invoice). Dealers aren’t “allowed” to sell to (ship to) canada, they are not to my knowledge prohibited from selling to someone there. ie you might want to buy a fancy projector for your parents in the states… and that should be fine, as long as it ships to the US..

Meantime-
This was standard stuff when I was an online dealer – hasn’t changed since the late nineties…

best of luck -a

Hey, ain’t it great that I spend more time yakking about black level performance than anything else. And that’s the bottom line, not which chip, but final results. BTW, higher numbers do not promise blacker blacks. The old IN83 – a favorite projector of mine, lacked a dynamic iris, and used the Darkchip 4, yet it had mediocre black level performance, probably no better than the HC3800, but at $5000, not $1000+ What’s mediocre around $5000 is still pretty darn good around $1500. -a

1. Personally I don’t think the panny or the epson in best mode can fill a 120″ 1.1 gain screen. Run the numbers – even with new lamps, you’ll probably find the ft-lamberts down around 12-14. per the movie theater folks at smpte 12 should be the minimum, for a theater, and 16 is probably where they should be. By the time your lamp has run half of its life, you can probably figure a drop of 25-30% of your brightness. And remember, technically, the “life” of a lamp is the number of hours until its brightness has dropped to 50%. With my 128″ firehawk G3, (a 1.25% relative gain), the Epson still comes out thin. (btw, your screen would be brighter than mine, relative isn’t the same as real gain, if the screen you are looking at is quoting real gain (brighter than white paper?).

Of course you could go with brighter modes, but that changes some of the things that are attractive about it, with the Epson or Panny. The HC3800, on the other hand has the “best” mode lumens to handle the screen no problem.

Bright best mode projectors are hard to find. You want significantly better black levels – than the HC3800, you have to look to the Panny, the Epson 8500UB, and the BenQ W6000. The more expensive Epson, and the Panny still are thin on “best” mode lumens.

The BenQ W6000 gives you the brightness and the black levels, but is probably out of your price range. I know of nothing typically under $2000 other than the HC3800 with a great picture, and lots of “bright”, and while its black levels are good for what it is, it is not what I call an “ultra-high contrast” projector. (typically thanks to a dynamic iris). Oh, there are a couple of possibles, but with sloppy iris action that makes watching them almost painful once in a while, on the “wrong” kind of scenes.

Rock and a hard place? Best of luck! -art

I’m at a loss as to what to get.

Originally I was going to get the epson 8100, then I found out about the Pannasonic AE4000, but then got worried that a 120″ screen would be too big, and wasn’t sure it could handle some ambient light during the day. Most recently I’ve been leaning towards the HC3800 but I’m a little concerned with the talk about light leakage and a little concerned w/ audible noise from the projector.

What I like about what I’m hearing about the 3800 is that it s bright and very sharp(very high on my list). Also am not sure about black levels, I’ve read some things that say it has really good black levels and then others that say they are not so good, so, I’m not sure what to believe on that one

I plan on buying a 120″ dalite perm wall w/ high contrast cinema perf(1.1 gain – same as their hc cinema vision but is AT)

My primary use is for movies, and blu ray television(lost), I also watch soccer but am a bit less concerned about that being perfect as I am movies and tv, though I don’t want motion blur either.

Do you have any advice for me?

Thanks,

James