I finally got a chance to fly the P3D on my 135" projector screen. The projector is SONY HW45ES bought for my simple home theater in the basement.

 

All I want to say is that I was totally overwhelmed, awed, shocked by the few flight hours I had so far. The experience truly is incredible for being unbelievably life-like. I actually never had a strong desire to fly P3D on a screen of this size as I thought even 4K may not be of enough resolution at 135". Boy was I totally wrong. Even at ~6 feet away the 1080p solution feels at least more than 90% sufficient (I can say this because I also fly P3D on a 65" 4K TV). 

 

I guess that once you're approaching a screen close to 150", the sheer physical size makes your brain believe that you're really looking at a window of real world. And somehow this sense of immersion greatly compensates the low resolution of 1080p. 4K would certainly be better but the key here is that 1080p is no problem period. 

 

I also found that on such big screen the over-sized virtual cockpit breaks the sense of immersion greatly. Once I started flying without cockpit everything began to feel so much more real and life-like. I'm now putting the cockpit on a second monitor, easy. 

 

I know not everyone has the opportunity to go down this road, but if you can I strongly encourage you to give projectors a try. It's actually relatively cheap. 45ES projector is widely regarded as one of the best in its class at $2000, plus a screen that costs ~$350. Together they're not much more expensive than a high-end big 4K TV. 

 

My dream now is to fly P3D on three 135" screens - but I know that's exactly where I should stop dreaming so I won't get thrown out of the house... 

By the way, once blown to 135" you can really appreciate the enormous amount of details P3D draws every frame. The number of autogen houses, trees, roads, cars etc etc on the screen are just unreal, as you now see every single one of them so clearly even they're just of the size of few pixels. It feels like a miracle that I'm actually getting 20-30fps with high settings. 

Very interesting - it would be pretty cool to have the outside projected as large images on walls, and a smaller, closer panel for dedicated instruments.   I was once an instructor at a college that had access to some pretty good projection systems and I did try out MSFS (I think it was version 5.0 at the time) and thought it was super cool.  

 

Mark

Projector for outside view (no cockpit) + 2nd touch screen for panels is exactly what I set up here. I don't know how to post images here but you can kind of see it in my profile image. 

 

The beauty is that a quality 1080p projector these days is fairly cheap compared to those fancy 4K big screen TVs. Its only drawback is the room requirement. If you have a basement then things should be easy.

 

I'm totally spoiled by the 135" screen and sony 45es projector. If I want to have a projector dedicated to P3D I might consider to give Benq HT2150ST a try. It's a DLP projector at only half the price ($1000) with short throw. The picture quality may not be as good as Sony, but could be easier to setup due to it can placed much closer to the screen.