I've graduated from watching TV to experiencing true Home Theater. That's about how I can best sum it up after retiring my old 48" rear projection tv set and installing an overhead front projection HDTV system. Wow!!! Yamaha has done an excellent job engineering this unit. Here's what it does and how it works.

Yamaha has been well known for their musical instruments and their sweet sounding amplifiers and receivers. But until recently they were not involved in image displays. They are now offering a line of DLP and LCD projection systems for HD display that offer the kind of quality and performance that complements their audio products quite nicely and here's why I say that.

The LPX-500 is a 3 chip LCD projector using a broad spectrum gas discharge lamp as the light source. The color separation optics within this projector guarantee excellent and accurate primary colors so the projected image is richly colored within the limits of the HDTV standard and that's pretty damn good. I made measurements of the RGB primaries and they are equal to or exceed the ATSC standards. What that means in English to the non-technical is pictures will show rich red reds, green greens, blue blues, and all the intermediate colors of the rainbow, just as the film directors intended. Adhering to the ATSC standard insures that not only will colors be brilliant and vibrant, they will also be accurate and of the correct hue and saturation adhering to what was programmed in at the studio. Nice! Real eye candy.

So what else is good about this unit? Lots. Let me explain.

To make a good picture in HDTV, you need a number of things to be right. The native resolution of the chips used is 720 x 1280 pixels. This is not quite full 1080 x 1920 (the highest res used for HDTV) but is very good and as good as the chips used in theatrical presentations of digital cinema. Yamaha has incorporated a processing engine to upconvert any input to the 720 display standard so what you see is much better than the low res images you are used to on a regular tv set. Playing back a regular wide screen DVD is a revelation and looks like a really good projected original film image. This is all thanks to the Faroudja licensed processing to remove 3:2 pulldown artifacts and create a real progressive scan image out of those meager DVD pixels. Feed this projector with a 3 cable component signal out of a DVD player and you have a very nice imaging system.

Calibration is easy. For those of you who can do this on their own, the RGB levels are easily adjusted to get correct color balance across the board from dark to light parts of the image. There are even RGB gamma controls to get good gray scale tracking even in midtones, something I've never seen before in either consumer or professional displays. Very Nice!!!!

Image detail is impressive. Everything on the disc is visible. No enhanced edges if you set it up properly using a calibration disc such as Digital Video Essentials or AVIA, but lots of fine detail to the limits of the signal feeding the system. Another Very Nice!!!

Color looks great. Color decoding is perfectly accurate. No red push, no decoding distortions, just good perfectly accurate color. Wow!!!

True 16:9 display makes wide screen look as intended. You can change the aspect ratio at will by selecting menu options to correctly display whatever you are feeding it. Are you watching off the air broadcasts? Then select the NORMAL mode for a 4:3 image with black bars left and right. Are you watching a wide screen movie? Then select SQUEEZE mode to fill the 16:9 screen for a real cinematic experience.

Inputs: lots of choices. You can connect just about anything up to this unit. For composite signals, you can feed it NTSC, PAL, or SECAM signals. Very cool for the internationally minded. You can feed it with VGA signals for that Power Point presentation, or Y-Pr-Pb for either HD or SD feeds for full wide band signals from your satellite box or DVD player. There is also a DVI connector for the digitally minded with up to date satellite and DVD players and future HD gear not yet on the market. And for those with S-Video devices, the projector can take that too.

Revised 12-01-04 WARNING: RANT COMING UP....Now: Here's the GLITCH!!!!! If you have DVI source signals, you may have some problems. This projector was an early implementer of DVI, a newish digital signal format for delivering HD data from a source such as a Satellite receiver or an HD Cable box to the projector. It has gone through industry changes in 2003-2004 that changed the format of the signal to incorporate HDCP protocol. HDCP stands for High bandwidth Digital Content Protection. HDCP is supposed to protect program content from unauthorized viewing or copying, a big concern of movie makers these days as consumer products get better and better and program content on consumer delivery systems starts to approach HD mastering quality. Movie makers are very worried about losing their huge investments in feature films and have pushed copy protection protocols on the consumer industries. HDCP is a work in progress. The LPX500 is NOT COMPLIANT so will NOT work with newer DVI devices and you will not be able to deliver a digital signal directly to your projector!!!!! I found out the hard way about a year after I bought this beauty and am furious (I'm writing this addendum now on December 1, 2004, almost a year to the day after I originally wrote this review). My old HD satellite receiver was also non-compliant so it worked fine. However, I moved recently and cannot receive satellite in my new location so was froced to get cable and the new box from the cable company will not pass a DVI signal to my non-compliant projector!!!!!! After many emails, phone calls, and online research, Yamaha has admitted the box is non-compliant and will not ever be brought up to date. Irresponsible on Yamaha's part if you ask me. $4,000 and obsolete in just under a year!!!!! Can you say FURIOUS??? Well I can. Just beware, if you want this baby, and it does make some beautiful pictures, get it cheap since you will not be able to use it with DVI. End of rant, now back to the old review.

All in all, I'd say this is a terrific projector, not too expensive (I paid around $4,200 for mine) and pretty quiet too. Expected lamp life is around 2,000 hours, replacement bulb is around $400. You should get a few years use out of the bulb before it needs replacing but remember this as an operating expense.

Note: This projector is categorized by Epinions in "Multimedia Projectors" although it is clearly designed and marketed as a Home Theater projector for wide screen HDTV viewing, not as a business presentation projector. There should be a category in Electronics for this kind of thing related to Televisions and HDTV. I suppose you could use it for a multimedia presentation but that would be a big surprise to Yamaha who are trying very hard to market to home theater enthusiasts. Please rate and comment accordingly.

Thanks
Dave

Recommended: No

Purchase Price (if leased, monthly payment): 4,200