Monitors or Projector?

[markgrizzo]

Henry,

I would go for the 3 22" LCD monitors. I currently have 3 20" LCD monitors with Triplehead2go and really like the setup. Using Triplehead2go is going to give you a wider field of vision then by having just one monitor. You want to also consider what your plans for your simulator are in the future. Do you want to eventually go with 3 projectors? If so, then I would buy the one projector for now.

Mark

[Kennair]

Henry,

Surprisingly there was little or no frame hit adding the third monitor. I was using it in dual head mode with a resolution of 2400x600 then added the third monitor and changed the res to 3840x1024. I was expecting a serious slow down but none! This is an amazing piece of kit I must say. In fact I swear my frames increased when I added it for the first time.

I'm running a low end system AMD 3.2M with 2g ram and a 6600 256m video card, so nothing to write home about by todays standards! Frames locked to 25 and getting mid to late teens on the ground, 20-25 at altitude, sliders mid to high. Slideshow at major airports though. But I am running the TH2GO with 3 screens PLUS two 17" LCD's for instruments off a second PCI card on the one PC and it's still clearly flyable. (upgrade needed soon though!)

As Mark suggested, I'm going for the 22" lcd's eventually. I am still waiting but every month the prices are dropping, which is good, but I've got to bite the bullet eventually. You may be limited by the Matrox's res but the larger more immersive view would be amazing.

Do yourself a favour and get the Matrox (no I'm not affiliated with them in any way)

Ken.

[NicD]

Think I've "sold" dozens of TH2GOs recently, but not afiliated at all, and I receive no commission

I was also very suprised to find that the unit has almost no impact on frame rates on my rig. Amazing!

[Kennair]

Hi Nic, love your sim and learning a lot from you Ta

And of course if you are using projectors, as you are, there's no need for any bezel management, so the cheaper analogue unit's the go!

Ken.

[andarlite]

OK, you guys got me convinced...... it'll be the Triplehead2go and 3 22 inch LCD monitors (well, actual 2 monitors until the wife let's me buy a 3rd one).

I was on the Flight Deck Solutions website looking (and drooling) over the 11 pages of gallery pictures. There were quite a few builders who had multiple monitors and the expanded view with the extra monitors was quite remarkable.

Is there a particular "zoom" setting to use with the multiple monitors or is everyone just sticking to 1x?

Regards,
Henry

[sbecker777]

The zoom setting depends on your distance from the monitors. Given I sit fairly far from the three LCDs in my 777 deck, my zoom is at .75.

I have an Excel spreadsheet that handily calculates the "proper" zoom given your monitor (or combination of 3 monitors in the TH2G case) horizontal dimensions and your actual eye distance from the screen(s). I'll upload tonight US Central time if I can.

Steve

[andarlite]

Steve

Thanks a lot. That would be great.

Regards,
Henry

[cdjung]

I just spent the weekend building an enclosure/support for my three 22" LCD's that I bought some weeks ago from Best Buy for $178 each when they had a sale. It took about a month for me to receive a digital TH2GO (they are currently backlogged due to an unexpected large demand). After a little experimentation I was convinced that the monitor setup was significantly superior to my projector so I decided to take down the projector and go solely with the three monitors. I had been using a single projector at 1024X768 for the last three years and while the scale is nice on a big screen there is always a loss of detail because of the ambient light conditions in the room. Now that I have moved to the three LCD monitors I have razor sharp visuals that I can enjoy without feeling like I have to be in a cave.

I have the monitors set 22 degrees off of the center and that seems to give the proper "feel". I am using the TH2GO with the virtual cockpit and Trackir when I want to sightsee, and I use the 2D scenery display when flying the heavies. The sense of "being there" in the VC is fantastic. I thought I was immune to that feeling of spatial disorientation that you can get from the visual cues fooling you, I was wrong. Even with "just" the three monitors I get that sensation of movement that comes from having such a wide presentation.

There is a lot of good information on using the surround system in the Wiki surround gamers forum. I occasionally like to switch to shooters (BF2 and HL2) to break things up, and the experience is really incredible. The available widescreen resolutions don't precisely match my native resolution but the distortion is slight and only I notice it.

When I decided to spring for the LCD montiors one of the things that attracted me about the Westinghouse models is that the controls were tiny and on the bottom of the monitor, the bezels are also small and with the newly implemented bezel management incorporated in the Matrox software the view feels very natural. In fact, in the 2D scenery only mode the bezels give a very convincing sense of looking out a cockpit window.

The only down side is that I had to back off on a couple of settings on FSX (Yes, I really did make the switch). I turned off the autogen and backed down traffic as well as water detail. It is now sikly smooth on a fairly old machine but overall the framerate hit was no biggie.

Constructing a holder for the monitors was a bit of a chore, but now that it is done and the monitors on sitting on my glareshield it was worth the effort.

Hope this helps.

CJ