Tom LaDuke

Lloyd You are not as far from the future as you expect and I anxiously await everything you suggested. In 1997 I paid $3500 dollars each for a 600 lumen, 200:1 contrast ratio LCD projector. Today, I can buy a 3500 lumen, 15,000:1 contrast ratio DLP projector for $700! Panasonic has 8000 lumen, 720P projectors with street in the $6K range. I prognosticate that in the very near future the following things will appear in some form in the projector marketplace 10,000 lumen, 1080P projectors for under $7000 It will have the hooks for a camera based auto calibration system it will accept something like the new HDbaseT HD over Cat6 to receive the media over long hauls of 300+ feet or more. Windows embedded on small form factor PCB's will have such blazing fast performance that they might be able to fit in to the input slot of most installation grade projectors. Watchout may actually run on this so the display machine might actually reside INSIDE the projector! Ok, thats ambitious but I can dream... The light source in the projector might involve RGB laser diodes delivered over fiber from remote source racks. All the color in all the projectors will match because of the shared massive parrallel blending of the laser arrays. And the gamut will be off the charts. It's going to be fun ! Keep on dreaming

We just used the Hall Research UH-1BTX HDbaseT Cat 5e / 6 extenders for a Disney project. We had five Watchout Display machines with Eyefinity graphics cards. We used active Display Port adapters for 4 outputs per machine through the HDbaseT transmitters. The signals were extended between 75' to over 300' . Hall Research updated their firmware to accomodate the Eyfinity drivers. These HDbaseT extenders are specifically designed for HDMI home theater applications so we used HDMI to DVI adapter cables at the the projector end of the runs. Having tested many different Cat extenders with dismal results, we were surprised and pleased with the performance of the HDbaseT technology. The ATI Catalyst Control Center reliably received the Christie projector EDID through HTbaseT everytime. We never had to do the "EDID dance" to get the projectors recognized by the graphics card. The cost difference between HDbaseT and SDI is considerable and we did not need the $2K plus SDI cards in the projectors. I agree with Adela. If using Eyefinity, test everything extensively including all outputs prior to your installation. Tom

Update Apparently you can never test enough We are now in the field deep in to our installation. HDBaseT units installed on 14 channels of 1080P Extenders work fine. Longest run is 220 feet But.... ATI Eyefinity 6900 series graphics card that we tested with up to six outputs will not work as expected We never tested multiple outputs at the same time, just distance and image quality. The Eyefinity requires at least one Displayport output when using three or more outputs from the card. The HDBaseT transmitter is not handshaking the third output. We have tried several different active displayport adapters, DP to HDMI, with no luck. The HDBaseT manufacturer is sending us an updated firmware version that may resolve this conflict. More to follow, clock is ticking Tom

I am interested to hear if any forum members have tried or implemented the new HD BaseT extension technology with Watchout multi-output setups. We have a major permanent installation in progress where we switched from our standard SDI extenders to HD BaseT. We tested five different manufacturers HD BaseT products with our ATI graphics cards and test results were very promising. I am not recomending any specific brand but I did test them for interoperibility and they all worked. You can read read about the technology at the hdbaset.org website. We used active display port to HDMI adapters in order to mate with the BaseT transmitter. Our Christie projectors and graphics cards recognized each other everytime because this technology passes the EDID. Using CAT 5E or Cat 6 UTP we were able to push 1080P 60 over 300' consistently. We have seen no watchout related issues. We would be very interested in hearing from anyone that has used this technology for extending HD video from Watchout machines. Our system will begin testing in Mid August and I will update the forum with our results. Tom