• 137 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Everyone has done a cracking job of the questions, so all I’ll add is:

    ISPs:

    Most ISPs are nationwide.
    Almost all fixed lines have no data caps.
    If you’re in a standard area, go with a provider that costs a little more, but have good customer service, and know their arse from their elbow.

    Zen are good imo. https://zen.co.uk/
    If you already know your address, their site will check what you can get, and how much it will be.

    If you get a friend to refer you, you also get a £25 love2shop voucher.

    Fixed line contracts are usually for 12-18 months.
    You can get one month ones (give me a shout if you want them pointing out), but you may be better off with a 5G dongle for short term accommodation.

    Further detail:

    Most ISPs use the same physical wires/fibres owned by OpenReach, or an altnet, which go from your house to the nearest exchange.

    You normally cannot speak to the wire/fibre provider directly, any maintenance request has to come from your ISP.
    So if there is ever a problem, you’re relying on the ISP doing the legwork. So good CS is critical, imho.

    You pay the provider, they pay the cable owner to get it to them, then provide the backhaul.

    There are some area based exceptions, like single-provider fibre.
    And there is also Virgin. But I wouldn’t go with Virgin.








  • Maybe the best way to think about it is not dark, but the absence of more light.
    On a DMD projector, we use tiny micromirrors for each pixel which flash thousands of times per frame of video.
    The flash/no-flash ratio decides how much light makes it out of the projector. This gives us over a thousand light levels per colour channel, from near dark, to full light.
    When the mirrors are not in position, the light output is very low. (1/1000th of the full output, on a projector with a static 1000:1 contrast ratio)

    The screen is designed to reflect light well, which means in a non-perfect room, it will have a light floor of the reflected ambient light, plus whatever still makes it through the projector (as Cygnus mentioned, room treatment).

    If you do treat a room well enough that the small amount of light that makes it through the projector at all-off is a problem, you can do things like fitting an ND filter to the lens (reducing the full light output, while also reducing the minimum).
    Or you can use the dynamic iris fitted to some projectors (which reduces the amount of light being put out based on the overall scene illumination, similar to the way LCD TVs lower the backlight level to “reach” contrast ratios of 100000:1).