I ordered my projector about a month ago. At the time, I was fairly unconcerned about shipping time. No sense paying to rush it when it’ll (still!) be weeks before I can really use it. But we would like to make sure the room proportions are right.
Apparently, my projector got lost somewhere in UPS. The vendor was supposed to send me another one by 2nd day UPS so it’d arrive last Friday. Didn’t happen. Turns out it didn’t get sent until Friday.
Then the ZIP code got misread somewhere and it got sent to northern Michigan. After a tour of Chicago suburbs, it came back this way and arrived today. I don’t know why it went wrong- my address was right on the label. But it got here.
Worse the wear, though. The box was beat bloody and the packing materials were pretty well neutralized. The machine itself looks OK so far. Not a scratch on its piano black finish. It is a fetishistic piece of gear, but it has to be at this price.
The crew had set up a rolling scaffold and a box to try to simulate the location the projector will be mounted. 
I had it throw a test pattern and adjusted it until I got what I wanted. I couldn’t push it as high on the wall as I’d hoped because the ceiling beams aren’t straight. The frontmost one infringes on the upper-right corner of the picture. I called the contractor and he thinks we can swap them around to get a more level profile.
It’s hard to tell in a picture (unless I worked a lot harder at getting the exposure right), but it looks pretty impressive- especially considering that’s thrown at some pieces of that pink insulation sheet stuff nailed up. It’s also hard to tell just how big it is. It’s 9′ x 5′. Feet. Yeah.
How big is that? Say you’ve got a 40″ HD TV. Pile up nine of them. A little bigger than that. Honestly, I’d go bigger if I could, but there are several reasons a five foot tall screen is about the limit. And in terms of width, this allows plenty of room for a door and front-facing equipment.
The projector can certainly go bigger. It can also lens shift in all directions an amazing amount. It’s kind of spooky. Those things will give us a lot of choices for projector placement.
Before I left it for the evening, I dragged the PowerBook in and ran some of the “Dexter” DVD to see how typical moving pictures looked. The current “screen” has a really low gain, so the dark scenes were hard to judge, but the sunny Miami stuff looked pretty nice. Needs some tweaking, but it gives decent demo. Also gave me a chance to use my new GyroTransport Air Mouse. Ha!