Usedcarsalesman met up with a small group of people to celebrate a friend's birthday at the Cat and Fiddle on Sunset Blvd. His friend having the birthday plays lead guitar in a band (with several very "download-able" singles) named "Gualberto," which is the name of its lead singer and lyricist. When the birthday dinner thing was done, he tagged along with his friend and his band-mates to a warehouse which has been converted to loft apartments near downtown LA.
We arrived at one of the apartments currently occupied by one of the friends of the band and his girlfriend. The apartment is one of these places with ceilings that are about 20 feet high and the only apparent room, apart from the main area serving as bedroom, living room and kitchen, is a bathroom. Very trendy, artsy, cool place.
Anyway, it's a Friday night and people including me are sitting around in the main area doing whatever. The band's friend hits a switch on one of the concrete pillars that supports the high ceiling. Down from one of the walls slowly unrolls this gigantic Projection screen, a screen which seemed like it was about 20 feet across diagonally. Usedcarsalesman was impressed with the size of the screen; it seemed like it was about twice the size of any roll-type projection screen that he'd ever seen, say in elementary school, that kind of thing.
But as he thought about the last time he'd seen a roll-down-type projection screen (like he said, elementary school), Usedcarsalesman was made to recall the dirty, grainy films he'd have to watch on them. These were not particularly appealing.
Sure, Usedcarsalesman saw projection-TV screens in bars that were showing sporting events, etc. And, the video resolution on those was OK, or at least better than the aforementioned elementary school fare. But, still nothing that made Usedcarsalesman think, "...AM SEEING STATE OF THE ART...MUST FIND A WAY TO BUY, EVEN IF HAVE TO SELL EITHER SOUL OR FIRST BORN(!)" like he did when he saw this one.
The owner popped a DVD in to a player connected to the video projector, a projector which was about 25 or so feet from the screen. The room darkened and then the video hit the screen. As emphasized before, Usedcarsalesman couldn't take his eyes off the screen! It had resolution better than any big-screen multiplex movie theater he'd ever paid 30 bucks to take a date to, whether digital projector, 70mm film, whatever -- Literally a 20 foot diagonal window in to another world!
Usedcarsalesman's respect for video projectors had instantaneously spiked upward like the Washington Monument! The crazy thing was, he didn't even think this projector was one of the expensive, $30,000 Runco projectors he'd vaguely heard of. He thought that what he was looking at was a garden-variety product from a nice, big-name Japanese company.
Needless to say, Usedcarsalesman was awestruck by this 20-foot-screen and the glorious resolution of the video displayed upon it. At the night's end, he sincerely felt that he owed the screen's owner $11.50 for the time spent viewing.
So, Usedcarsalesman is a definite new devotee of the modern video projector; if you have the living space, you can definitely use one of these projectors to literally own your own movie theater.
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