Have you ever thought of building your own projector? Well now is the time. A short series just started on Engadget - part 1. In this serie they will build a HD projector, from an LCD Monitor.

Actually it is not that difficult. Disassemble a desktop LCD display, put a bright light behind the display and add some optics and you’ve got yourself a projector.

The real question: is it worth it? Replacement lamps for commercial projectors cost around $300 each and only last a few thousand hours at most. The lamp in this projector should last about 10,000 hours and costs $50 to replace.

There are couple of places to check out if you want more information on this subject. Lumenlab recently made access to their forums. Alternatively, The DIYaudio forum users also discuss this topic.

The LCD is key to the project. The latest LCDs are cheaper and better than ever; the contrast ratio has been increasing. It’s important to choose a display that can be disassembled easily and won’t have any inconvenient electronics in the way.
Size does matter. The LCD size will affect the lenses required and obviously the size of the completed enclosure.

For this serie Endgadet uses the Samsung 940MW-SV Silver 19-inch 8ms Wide-screen LCD Monitor with built in TV Tuner. This beauty has a contrast ratio of 700:1 and a .294mm pixel pitch. The 16:10 screen has a 1440×900 native resolution, so it will display 720p natively. The built in scaler supports 1080 input as well. It sports DVI (With HDCP support), VGA, Component, S-Video input and even coax for the built-in TV tuner.

Now that you’ve got the general idea of what we’re doing, it’s a good time to start crunching numbers to get a rough idea of what we’re looking at. Lumenlab has a couple of calculators built just for figuring things out. Focalcalc runs under windows. Remember that if you’re entering the width of the LCD diagonally, then the screen width is a diagonal as well.

The parts Engadget bought so far:

• Samsung 940MW-SV $330 from NewEgg (We spotted them at Sam’s Club too)
• Pro Lens Kit (2x Fresnels and projection lens) $199 from Lumenlab
• Pro Reflector $15 from Lumenlab
• Ceramic Mogul Base $10 from Lumenlab (We scored an extra with our ballast)
• 400Watt 6500K Metal Halide bulb - $50 from Lumenlab
• 400Watt MH Electronic Ballast $99 from HID Hut
• 25 foot HDMI to DVI cable $37 from Monoprice [For our HR10-250 HD Tivo]
• 25 foot VGA cable $8 from Monoprice [For our HTPC]

Total parts cost far: $748

Left to buy: Enclosure, cooling fan and a few finishing touches.

Technorati Tags: HD projector, LCD Monitor, Samsung