Tom's Hardware Guide presents DIY XGA projector for <$300

November 15, 2004

While multimedia projectors have come down a lot in price over the past few years, projectors with XGA resolution are still too expensive for the average user. Tom's Hardware Guide has posted a guide on how to build your own projector for as little as US$300 with relatively cheap parts. While the DIY projector may look out of place in the average living room, it would be ideal for gamers and big screen lovers who just cannot afford a big screen and are willing to spend some time to build their own.

The parts required include an XGA 14" - 15" TFT monitor (easily obtained 2nd hand for $200), over-head projector (used for around $50), some polystyrene or cardboard, 8cm cooling fan and some adhesive tape. The most difficult task involved is dismantling the TFT monitor. The reason for this is to remove its casing, the backlighting and the inverter for the backlight. Once the actual delicate TFT panel is freed, this is placed on the over-head at a small height spaced by the polystyrene/cardboard to allow air circulation. The fan is mounted to force-air cool the TFT panel to prevent the heat of the projector's halogen bulb from overheating and potentially ruining the TFT panel.

Besides the lower initial cost, even replacement bulbs are about 1/10th the price of a typical multimedia projector's bulb or lamp making running costs very low. The other advantage is a much higher lumen rating by using an over-head projector with a high wattage bulb.

The well-known auction portal eBay has just about everything. For some time now, several sellers there have offered instructions for building a so-called "multimedia projector", as well as other "bargains" designed to help the customer get a giant screen at home without too much financial outlay. This is how it works: the seller offers a PDF construction guide for $20 in a "buy it now" auction that contains everything the customer needs to know. But does it really work?

These cheap deals were reason enough for us to take a closer look at the construction guides on offer. A sample of the three different sellers shows that for that $20, you don't get what you need: the PDF documents are so poorly produced that the construction project is more likely to end in confusion than success. For the most part, the instruction manuals are produced by self-publishers who combine rather wooden text with their own picture strips taken from private websites in a rather horrible fashion.

While these guides didn't seem like a great deal, they gave us the idea to stage our own "do-it-yourself projector" promotion. In contrast to the eBay offers we briefly examined, you should come away from our tutorial with a good foundation for building your own XGA projector, and of course, there's no charge! In order to offer a realistic impression of the picture quality possible, our new video provides a step-by-step guide to building and operating your own projector.

See the full guide with photos and video here.

While it is common to hear about people building their own PC's from scratch (I even built my own), this is the first time I heard of DIY for building a budget big screen for DVD watching or game playing. Then again, if the projector size or fan noises are not much of an issue, this may be ideal project for the hobbyist.

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Source: Tom's Hardware Guide