# LG PA75u 720p LED projector



## Ftoast (Nov 21, 2013)

I've seen the occasional thread pop up mentioning people having some fun with their inexpensive LED projectors (usually outdoors), and I figured I'd start one with my oh-so beloved pa75u. What it lacks in certain areas, it more than makes up for in portability, rugged-ness, and strangely addictive extra features that you end up wondering how you lived without. 

I'll probably add some outdoor pictures as time permits.


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## Ftoast (Nov 21, 2013)

It's a glorious sunny morning. The PA75u is still set up behind the familyroom seats from last-night's viewing and the 110" flat-white screen takes 5seconds to unhinge down in front of the LCD TV. The room is white; white walls white ceiling and off-white carpet. It's surrounded by windows without curtains and china-hutches with mirrored backs. This is a bad room at a bad time with a cheap LED projector. LET'S TAKE SOME PICTURES

The LG is setup for daytime viewing right now, with brightness turned up so blacks aren't terribly crushed by the sun and colors are turned up a little past clipping so they aren't as washed-out. There's one more weapon in its arsenal. "Dynamic Contrast" is a setting (off/low/med/high) that takes the image and tries to stretch the scene's contrast until the brightest part is near-white and the darkest part is wherever you have "brightness" control set. It, therefore can't do much to high-contrast scenes nor very bright scenes. It also tends to wipe out some small details and I recommend shutting it off during any dark-time viewing, BUT it really helps low-APL scenes cut through a bit of light.

The top row of pictures shows a midAPL live-action scene, a highAPL animated scene, and a very lowAPL live-action scene with plenty of black space.
The lower six shots show how much difference lowering the backlight/LED-brightness makes, going (left to right) bright, medium, dim.

That's roughly 400lumens trying to fill a 56"X90" space with about 11.5ftL.
It's pretty impressive to be able to see what's being projected with so much direct sunlight.


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## Ftoast (Nov 21, 2013)

Here's what those three different mid/high/low-APL shots look like at four common room-light situations using the PA75u.

Top to bottom:
-Direct sunlight pouring in mostly though the large bay window at my back.
-Indirect sunlight with the sun blurring through some cloud cover.
-Dawn light, plus indoor adjacent lighting around 400watts.
-Dawn light, all indoor lights off. 

There's enough light in the room to read small print in the top two picture-sets and more than enough to pass some snacks around or walk without stumbling in all four sets. The dim, early morning light (lowest row) provided a wonderful compromise of usable light for navigating the somewhat messy familyroom without noticeably hurting the on-screen image, and a simple pair of dimming table-lamps should yield similar results.


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## Ftoast (Nov 21, 2013)

Here's the LG pa75u covering the garage with a 21X12ft. image. I'm getting tempted to paint it all bright white to gain a little brightness and lose the dark trim boarders.


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## Ftoast (Nov 21, 2013)

With no nearby plug-ins I ran out of extension-cord. If there's a next time, I'll probably just use the $20 lawnmower battery/inverter combination so I'm not limited by cords. This ended up being a little smaller (around 16ft or 17ft wide), but the brightness increase helped the camera quite a bit.

Updated: Found another cord and was able to fill the 25ft wide area (25X14 at 16:9). It starts getting pretty dim for the phone-camera (which is notably terrible at lower-light photography), but is pleasantly vibrant to the eyes at night. There was a small fire about 30ft to the left, but it didn't seem to hurt the image enough to notice. We ended up watching a couple hours of 2-stories-tall video after bringing out an active subwoofer to assist for sound.


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## H_Roark (Apr 3, 2011)

Hello, I have this projector, and I really like it! But I have the chance to get the new 85u for a little over a thousand. Do you think the difference would be worth it? Thanks.


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## Ftoast (Nov 21, 2013)

H_Roark said:


> Hello, I have this projector, and I really like it! But I have the chance to get the new 85u for a little over a thousand. Do you think the difference would be worth it? Thanks.


That depends on a few things and how important each is to you. The 75u is actually BETTER at scaling lower definition video as well as showing less artifacts from using the digital keystroke correction (which you should try to avoid whenever possible), so the 85u only has an advantage for full 1080 content. The 85u also lacks 3D, which was an odd choice on LG's part. 

The 85 has a small brightness increase and a small contrast increase (I'm talking actual measured, not silly listed specs), which are certainly welcome but not big enough to make a night and day difference. The 85 also adds a built-in netflix and optical audio output.

If you mostly watch Bluray 1080p, don't care about 3D and the $1200 isn't painful, go for it.
If you watch a lot of TV/cable DVD and internet content, and/or value 3D, the pf85u will actually be a downgrade.
If you're somewhere between, the price difference is likely hard to justify and it might be worth your while to wait for the next upgrade that will feature all the benefits of the 85u along with 3D and likely a bit of zoom or lens-shift..and more built in goodies perhaps even Bluetooth/wireless audio!


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