Does Sage/HD100 accomplish necessary scaling for CIH?

[spvoyek]

This is from a post I put up on the AVS Forums, so it was written for that audience, but I suspect there may be some good knowledge in the Sage forums too:



I'm currently planning my first home theatre and am a bigtime newbie in regards to almost every aspect involved.

Constant Image Height (CIH)/2.35:1 was recently brought to my attention when I was discussing projector selection with a neighbor who is also planning a home theatre. His projector selection was based on his desire for CIH. I've browsed through this forum to try to educate myself on the subject and think I have a general understanding, but would like an expert opinion before I move forward.

My plan, prior to learning of CIH, was to use a Sage HD100 to access all of my media that would be fed to the projector. If I understand CIH, I think that my plan to use the Sage HD100 has given me the benefit of being able to select any projector because it can do the vertical scaling necessary, which it looks like most posters in here are having done either by a scaler or their projector. In other words, is the Sage HD100 an adequate scaler? I am able to program custom aspect ratios into Sage, so I think I should be able to use it to scale all of my media such that I can leave the anamorphic lens in place at all times.

The projector I'm most interested in is the Epson Home Cinema 1080 UB.

Then I would need an anamorphic lens to do the horizontal stretching, possibly the one from HTB.


I'm just looking for some words of wisdom to let me know whether or not I'm on the right track.

Thanks!

[bialio]

I frequently use both full clients and extenders with my CIH setup at home. Sage's scaling looks just fine to me, and is no worse than the scaler and / or other PC options out there.

If you are interested in HD movies on your CIH setup - BluRay or HD-DVD - you might just want to rethink the everything goes through Sage idea. You can use Sage as a pretty decent front end to launch PC based BluRay players (like PowerDVD or TMT) - however you won't get Sage's scaling on the external programs.

btl.

[Lucas]

Using SageTV and its aspect ratio settings means that the projector you select does not have to do the vertical stretch so CIH is really easy with any PJ + anamorphic lens.

[Fuzzy]

I second BTL's comments regarding blu-ray/HD-DVD limitations, as I'm not sure of an approved HD Player that will playback those and support custom scaling. Best option at this point would be to use the Sage Extender, and rip the movies to HDD for playback. Obviously, this takes time/storage space, but HDD's are cheap.. :-)

[spvoyek]

Thanks for the information. I actually like the convenience of having my movies ripped, so the ripping approach is A-OK with me!