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SIM2 Grand Cinema RTX55

SIM2 takes TV back to the future

By Steve Ballantyne

December 2003

SIM2 Grand Cinema RTX55. $29,999

When I was a lad it was a point of Imperial pride that British pioneer John Logie Baird had actually invented television, and it was only by an accident of fate that the TVs we watched at home somehow seemed to bear no resemblance whatsoever to the machines Baird worked on. Poor old Baird's TV systems were all electromechanical, with weird spinning disks to scan the image and similar spinning arrays of mirrors to reconstruct it on tiny screens in a small number of 1930s British living rooms. Baird even experimented with colour TVs using filter wheels, but eventually electromechanical TV was displaced by electronic systems.

But like spinning colour filter wheels and scanning disks, what goes around comes around, and if you've been keeping up with video projection technology you'll be aware that the current technology of choice is... arrays of mirrors and spinning colour wheels, courtesy of Texas Instruments' DLP chips, which do that old electromechanical thing, but on a scale Baird probably never imagined. A very small scale - TI crams an array of 1280 by 720 tiny mirrors sitting on top of solid-state actuators onto a silicon chip.

Video projector makers, including SIM2, have adopted the DLP technology with enthusiasm for their somewhat-pricey to gosh-that's-expensive models, with SIM2 leaning more towards the latter category. As far as I know, however SIM2 is the first to take the great leap back to the '30s and put the whole lamp/ mirror/ processor/ optical system caboodle into a cabinet with its own screen.

The SIM2 Grand Cinema RTX55 is a fantastic piece of work - with a 55inch screen it stands 4ft tall (that's 1.2m in our money) and 5ft (1.5m) wide, but a mere 1ft 4in (.4m) deep. It's a big sculptural piece of silvery Italian furniture, with a shiny black glass panel on the front.

The first generation of DLP projectors drew complaints from some viewers who perceived irritating colour fringing and flicker; the current DLP chips have mirrors that can tilt a little more (thus modulating brightness a little better) and a colour wheel that spins twice as fast. That seems to have done the trick - I watched the RTX55 in the company of someone notoriously sensitive to flicker, who didn't complain in the least.

That SIM2 uses a DLP chip is somewhat academic in the case of the Grand Cinema, which really is a closed box as far as users are concerned. There may be a colour wheel inside spinning at 9000 rpm, but I couldn't hear it; and the light on the screen may be produced by a high-intensity bulb with a 6000 hour life, but apart from the picture there's only a faint warm draught emerging silently from the slots at the back of the cabinet to show it's there. For the money you'd want impeccable execution of small details, and the Grand Cinema generally delivers.

The big detail is the picture on the screen. I found it generally satisfactory, although not as crisp as the picture on some of the large plasma screens. But that's inevitable given that individual image pixels are spread to cover a slightly greater area than on the plasma screens; besides, that gritty digital look you get with some plasma and LCD screens isn't to everyone's taste.

I had hoped that colour purity as a result of the colour filter wheel would be more evident, but without doing a direct comparison with its competitors the Grand Cinema didn't appear all that remarkable. That's probably a tribute to the decades of refinement that have gone into the development of TV phosphors - they're actually doing pretty well even if a system like DLP should have a theoretical edge.

Certainly the Grand Cinema gives a brighter, more even picture that can be watched from a wider range of viewing angles than any other back projection TV I've ever seen. However, it's probably best not to let the screen brightness tempt you into watching in too well-lit a room - the broad contrast range of the image means that deep shadows will easily allow the flat screen to work distractingly well as a mirror. Draw the curtains before settling down to watch Dark City, Batman, or any cinema noir.

What you put in to a device like the Grand Theatre is up to you. A DVD-player size control box connects to the Grand Cinema by way of a single fibre optic cable; there are more than 30 sockets on the back of the box, with two inputs each for composite video, s-video and RGB, three for RGBH/V via RCA connectors, five BNC sockets for another RGBH/V feed, an RS232 and a DVI-D socket for computer buffs, three fibre optic links and a 12V power outlet just for luck. An unremarkable remote control rounds out the affluent couch potato's tool kit.

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