I Bought a Movie Theater Projector… Turns Out They’re SUPER Dangerous

Inside this box is a Christy CP2230 projector. Brand new, this bad boy was worth about $50,000. And that's before any costly 4K or 3D upgrades. But that was 10 years ago. And thanks to the onward march of time, not to mention the slowly dying theater industry, I was able to pick up two of these bad boys for a fraction of that price, including shipping from Canada's second most seceding province. But they're just projectors. Why are they so big? Because these projectors are not just a lamp and some color filters inside of a shoe box like you might see in a home theater setup. These bad boys come with an entire server rack each that handle the inputs, the power, and to be honest, we don't really know, which is why we're going to rip them open, attempt to set them up, and see if we can find a use for them. Maybe here, maybe at Whale Land. I'd rather not, sir. Why? Well, because you see, according to the spec sheets, if anyone is within 2 m of this thing and decides to look at the bulb, they will go blind immediately and permanently. Is this even safe to Ellen? Probably not, which is why I decided not to tell the safety team that we were shooting today. Okay, that's probably fine. As long as you be sure to tell the safety team about our sponsor, you green. Their light and foldable Nexo Air is a great 65 watt charger for all of your Apple devices. You'll get over half a charge on your MacBook Air in just half an hour. Grab yours or learn more about UG Green's Air lineup at the link below. Flash. Which one of these are we opening? Well, we have to open all three eventually. Which one do you want to start with? You don't know what's in them? I have no idea what's in wit. All right. What's in? What's in wit? That shows how unprepared we are. Let's start with this one, which probably contains a Christy CP2230, a large format projector that's capable of running screens up to 86 ft with a rated output of 33,000 lumens. For context, the Epson projector that I used to have in my home theater offered up a pretty awesome bright HDR experience on a 120in screen with uh 2700 lumens. It was introduced back in 2012, so it is a little bit on the older side, but over the years, Christy offered multiple upgrades to add 3D capabilities and even to increase the resolution from 2K, which is basically 1080p, all the way to 4K. How did I end up with them? Well, TLDDR, some jokester on the subreddit noticed an IMAX projector on Bid Spotter, and they were like, "That'd be funny." And we were like, "Yeah." But we couldn't get that because it turns out you can't sell those and IMAX actually ended up sending a team to destroy that projector rather than allow some tech YouTuber to buy it. I took that personally. But not every screen in that 15 screen theater was IMAX. So after scrolling past the headless Tintin statues, urinals, and arcade machines, I found that they were offloading all of the other AV gear from the theater as well. So, the idea was that with two of these, I could finally fulfill my dream of building a stereoscopic 3D gaming experience for Whale Land. I don't think that's going to work. This would literally melt or shatter any 3D filter. But they have 3D. What does that even mean? It says that it'll only do 3D at 30 fps, though. Yeah, but No, no, don't make me pull out the thing. That's the lamp one. Well, whatever. The point is it said 60 fps on the page I showed you. But I thought it No, it was talking about 60 fps when you put both of them together. So you get 30 each eye. This is my first time looking at it, too, buddy. Okay, we're going to figure this out together. What does this Oh, did we manage to unbox the one that doesn't have a projector in it? Oh, wait. Oh. Oh, wait. Oh, this is one of the 3D filters. This sits in front of the projector according to the photos on the auction site. Wait. Yes. That's how it works. Yes. That's why our little dinky filters that we had for the 3D at your house would like die. So, this has the filters for the left and right eye alternating. Oh, I Oh, yeah. You can actually see the separation between them. Yeah. Oh, that makes so much more sense now. How the hell are we going to get that to work? We're going to find out. Was this supposed to come with a termination to something? Did they just like cut it from the wall and just give it directly to you? It may be a little over our heads here, Elijah. Lord Almighty. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's one one of the filters. Wo. What is all this? I think these were wall-mounted if I remember correctly in the auction photo. The drywall anchors. Wow. They did not on the pallet. I mean, they can't be that heavy then. Oh gosh, sir. Hold on. Sorry. What is rattling? There's so many new screws in here. Okay, so this is just basically glorified switches as far as I can tell. Panic. What does that mean? Oh god, I forgot there was another one of these. Look, dude, we haven't even gotten to the projectors yet. Do we want to open these boxes that came with it? Yeah, I'm afraid to find out what's in them. Lens. What? Shatter. That's how you open a lens, right? Whoa. Holy crap. These are huge. What do you see, Captain? LAND AOY. I wasted me money. Pallet. Pallet one. Pallet. Pallet two. What the Sam heck is up with this pallet? Got this little pinner piece right here. Oh, hello. Oh my god. It's like I know. That's why I'm like Wo, dude. It's so precarious. Yeah, I know. That's why I'm over here holding it. Is that for cooling? Yes. So, in the pictures on the auction site, this was just piped up to the roof kind of like a laundry shoot or like a laundry dryer thing. So, I think it's just heat. Raw heat going to come out of this. Warning. lamp may explode, causing bodily harm or death. I mean, we said this thing was dangerous. Yeah, we'd hate to let the people down. Someone's got to die of this video. What the hell were we thinking? Don't you say we you. All right, good luck. That's only the first one. This gives us a better look at it. So, up here we've got Oh, wow. Kind of beautiful, isn't it? So, that right there would be my mirror array, I guess, then. And then behind it would be Oh my god. Like all of this is light source. That's crazy. So this is probably the access hatch for the lamp. Oh, they're not locked. Wo. Shut up. It's liquid cool. Oh my gosh. No way. Use Jeff Cool E105. Really? Jeff Cool in the movie theater. My name Jeff. Oh, dude. Dude, they use colder quick release fittings. Oh, so you can These These are the Oh, really? Yeah. The brand is colder, dude. These are These are like $105 each or something like that back when I researched them cuz I wanted to bring them in at NCIS. Well, I'm really glad they didn't cut any corners in a $50,000 projector. Also, is this a DDC with like an EK Delin top on it or something that I was going to say this looks just like a PC water pump. Like, this does not look like anything custom almost, you know? So, this is a three chip DLP and you've got water cooling one, two, three for each of the DLP chips. Is that all in the same loop? I can't quite see. Yes, it's all in the same loop and it's coming over to this single 120 mm radiator. So, it's not actually a ton of heat. It's just about the concentration of the heat and getting it away from those chips during I mean long-term operation, right? If nothing else, this is certainly a fun adventure. Do you want to do this one next? We can try. All right. Should we spin it around for them? No. Oh, yeah. There's one broken, but I just found this on the floor. I think we found the key. Oh, let's hope. Dude, this feels like a video game. You're just like walking around and you find a random key. You're like, "Oh, is it for the door that I couldn't unlock before?" Let's go. All right. What's in here? Terrible. Oh my lord. Okay, I'm very glad we didn't rip this door off because if we turned this on without this shielding here. Oh, I couldn't imagine what that would be like. Hey, Elijah, I figured out why the projector's so heavy. Oh, the entire freaking base is made of milled aluminum. Oh, it's one P. Oh my Holy cow. Is this like a chassis detector? Yeah. So, we had to keep this closed. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, no. We would have had it closed. I was just going to drill out the lock. You're still going to close it. Let's look at the IO. Uh oh, dude. DVI, baby. $15,000 DVI to HDMI converter. General purpose IO, serial 3D sync of some sort, presumably. And then it also takes SDI in. I don't know what server port does, but I think I saw something similar over in the server rack. So, why don't we take a look at that? Oh, okay. What is this? What do you got? Adorable. Hacking the main frame. Some random gigabit switch. Pass through holes with a power bar. Um, presumably for this automation controller. So, this is going to be for crap like your, you know, curtains and whatnot, I assume. Oh, buddy. Oh, you got a lot of cables back here. What am I attached to? Like everything. Is this a content server? Christy Digital Systems often utilize GDC technology media servers. There's no way that this thing isn't like locked down AF. I mean, the only way to find out is to boot it up, I guess. Hey, Elijah, if you were hoping that this rat's nest would be easy to decipher, I got bad news. This is great. It's labeled. Also, they just cut everything out of wherever it was. Is that Oh, that is the other end. Okay. The worst part is if this label's anything to go by, this is probably the encryption. Oh, okay. That's annoying. But then I didn't see anywhere for this to plug into back here. So, I mean, does that match the projector, though? The answer is yes. It lines up with the port labeled audio AES, which makes sense cuz this is AES out. You got a spot for me, boys? Nope. This gives us a bit of a better look at this machine. Yep. It's a piece of crap. But what it does have is this AJA interface card that I am not super familiar with. IMB interface that plugs That looks like the same port. Yeah, it is for the GDC card. Yeah. Okay. And we have that cable. It wasn't cut off. Okay, that's good. Well, we don't have to use this. We can just plug into the HDMI in on the projector. Oh, yeah. But it doesn't like, you know, can I change the input? It doesn't come with a remote or anything. So, like, how do I manage my interface? Try the marriage button. I mean, it's not scary, right? Would you rather the panic button or the marriage button? Well, they're both the same eventually. First one than the other. Found another one that wasn't cut off. So, here's the GPIO. Okay. Hey, Glenn, you know lenses, right? You ever seen this before? Where? Hold on. Where was the Oh, unlock first. there you go. Okay, then that should lock it. I feel like we're putting Oh, that went in easier now. And then lock. Make sure to lock it. Was that it? You just put it in and lock it. I That does not seem right at all. DL over here. You know what that stands for? Big lens. At this point, I think everything else we're looking at is either the GPIO for that automation controller or just like C13 power cables and RJ45 network cables. Like everything here is standard stuff. I think we've got everything we need other than power for the projector to try this thing out. Okay, I will work on getting it set up. Do you want me to unbox the second one as well? I would just leave it for now. Okay, well stay tuned, kids. One kissy projector setup later. Wow. You did this all on your own? Sort of. I can't take full credit. I think you mean no. I actually emailed Christy and they actually got back to me within about a day. and they emailed me all of the manuals, all of the instructions for this model of projector. Wow. Okay. They also gave us a huge safety warning. You remember how we opened that lamp at the beginning and we were like, "Wow, this looks cool." Yeah, it did look cool. Yeah. It will kill you if it explodes. Oh, cool. That makes it even cooler. It's a xenon bulb. And I'll put footage of what they look like exploding here. Um, but they actually recommend that you wear a full face shield, ballistic suit, and safety gloves when you're operating it. And we were just like, ooh, it was really not okay. But the good news is I didn't have to go in there in order to get it working. After I emailed Christy, they gave me all the manuals. They then ghosted me. Oh. I think that what happened was when they were trying to get me in touch with a Christy certified representative Yeah. they all basically were like, I don't want to touch this thing. Yeah. Cuz it was shipped Lord only knows how with all those bulbs in it. And has been touched now by us. Yeah. But damaged goods basically. It was enough for us to get it up and running. Would you like to fire it up or I would. Okay. Step one, we have to plug it in over there, sir. Step two, we need to go underneath and flip two switches down there. Would you like me to do it? You're sore. No, I'm good. Okay. Yes, that's switch one. And you should hear it pretty soon here. Start firing up. Wait, I I flipped two switches. Oh. H. It's probably fine. Hey, it's booting. There we go. What does this thing run like? Windows 98. I'm not really sure what it runs. That was an old school BIOS. It's very old. Yes, it can take like 15 to 20 minutes to heat up, so it might be a while. Should I be the one to tell them? The lens is pointing that way and your projector screen is there. Yeah. Well, this is a movie theater projector. I wanted a bigger display. Ah, I see. And then if it really sucks, maybe we can turn it around. While we wait, should we fire up the digital cinema server? It's not actually needed. This is only required for when you have all the licensing to deal with when you are leasing a movie in order to project it in a movie, which we don't. Instead, we're just going to use the DVI to HDMI converter that was thankfully included, and we're just going to hook up a computer to it, and we're going to game. Okay, so we've got an error. Light change recommended. We acknowledge this error. Circuit board serial numbers do not match. It's fine. One of the things you'll Yeah, it's fine. One of the things you're going to notice about this is it will probably give us an error. We'll clear the error. It'll give us two more. That's why it actually took me so long to get this thing up and running. And we might just have to do a couple more today. It's in working condition. And that's actually what these lights are. At a quick glance, you could see, oh, there's an error I have to clear. This is just a warning versus we're all good to go. Oh, our temperatures are all critical. Wait. Uh, warning. It will reboot. These are all very It rebooted. These are all very new errors. So, thank you. But I didn't do anything. You walked on to set. When this actually does turn on, do not stand there, Glenn. One of the things that we determined is while it's not as hot as it was warning us, it will blind you. When I got it booted before, I was probably 10 meters away and I happened to look back, I saw spots for the rest of the day. So, if you're like within 2 m, you you're done. Um, don't do that. Oh, I I did it by accident. Well, yeah, but don't do it by accident. Yeah, thank you, Captain Hindsight. Like, it's not even hindsight. We knew that already. Yeah, but I didn't like think about it. It's just like, oh, it's just a projector. It'll be fine. So now what we should be able to do is we can actually initiate power cuz this isn't on yet, right? This is just kind of getting us to the interface. So we need to hit the power button. All right, there we go. Hey, there's your cooling fans, buddy. Yes. So now it's really starting here. That blue tape is critical infrastructure. Um, we discovered that it gives an error when it's trying to exhaust, but there's an actual like mechanical thing that's supposed to open and like vent more. Yeah. So, we've just made it vent all the time. So, that that blue tape is critical for this. Oh, okay. It's just like holding down the flap. Yeah, basically. So, it's starting DLP and IMB. That has to do with the connection back to this interface. It will fail, which is fine because we don't need it. There's workaround space. Can we just cancel it? No, because you still have to let it go through the process. So, one moment, please. I'm starting to come around to the realization that I have purchased e-waste. Oh, yeah. And you bought two of them. So, now we're finally ready to actually turn on the bulb. Big moment. This is the moment where no one is allowed to walk in front of this projector. And this is where you're going to be very disappointed. Is it on? Thought you said it was bright. It is when you look at it, but these things are optimized for being in a pitch black movie theater. Now, there are some things we can do to verify that there is something on the screen. We can go to the test patterns and we can actually display something. Oh, it is totally working. Yes. Now, obviously it looks like we're down to the left right now. Oh, yeah. But we have lens shift, right? There is a whole bunch of lens shift in here. And obviously there's all your focus, your zoom, and everything else in here. So, so we could just Oh, wait. That's as far right as it goes. What can I tell you, dude? Like this is you bought this. Is it meant to sit like way at the back Well, no. It's centered. Yeah, but I already moved it all the way to the right. Can I not move it up? No. You also got to remember this thing is supposed to be mounted like at the top of your movie theater aiming down. I mean, we can throw it on a forklift. Okay. Zoom though. We have zoom. Yeah. So, you can obviously make it freaking massive. I can't believe how not that bright it is. You got to remember, very old lamp already in here. And one thing Lucas and I did discover, which we can find in the settings again, this is not 33,000 lumens like it claims, it seems to be around the 6 to 7,000 lumen mark. And I don't know if that's because of the actual lamp itself, Or if there's a setting that we're missing that's specifically unlocked by like a Christy certified technician. Wow, it looks just like an old crappy projector. It's got the flicker and everything. It's pretty bad. Another thing is, do you want to guess how much power this is drawing? 2500 watts. Let's find out. Cuz last time we checked, this was about 4,000 watts. Oh, I might have to log into the service account, which we found out the password for the service account was service. Nice. Intensity. 5800 lumens. Yeah. So, that's roughly what we think the lumen count is. We couldn't actually verify that, right? Wow. There's so much that you can do manually on this. You can move the light. It's and the lens. Oh, I wonder if that's why our default is like way the crap over there. Maybe do auto. Oh, it's definitely doing something. Oh, wo. Hey, it got brighter for a second there. It actually looks like it's doing something. Yeah, she's got some brightness in her. Well, that's brighter. It finished and it's at 11,000. Yeah, buddy. Okay, that definitely looks a lot brighter now. And it's more in focus than what you got it to. So, and it seems to be flickering even more. Well, can't win them all. Okay, what else we got? Let's put that rainbow test pattern on again. OH, WOW. WO, THAT IS A LOT more vibrant. Okay, now we're cooking with gas. Do you like the focus? Yeah, I couldn't help noticing that it's bang on right here and then off both here and here. We think we might have an issue with the lens alignment cuz if you look even in the top left, the light starts to like fade off. So, we're not sure if we're missing a piece to help center it or if we just sucked at putting it in. But, I mean, speak for yourself. I got three kids. Doing anything on this is horrible, man. I um Do you think this is the most you've regretted a purchase? No comment. Yeah, the firetruck was a better investment. Oh, literally though. We will yield no further content and no further use from these whatsoever. But hey, maybe if one of you guys wants one, we have two. Hit us up. The input lag is I was I was just going to say way better than I expected. like extremely usable, maybe even good. This is significantly better than I thought. That's what I'm talking about. Holy cow, we're so bad. Okay, now we just need to I got an idea. I got an idea. What if we fired it through the door in the theater room and see if we can hit the screen that's in there? And then anybody who turns around and leaves dies cuz they can't they can't get out the door. We'll be fine. We got this. We're not doing it, dude. This is freaking ridiculous. There's kind of a shadow in the top left and I figured it out. Do not look at the lens, but point the camera toward the lens. And you can actually see we shifted the lens so much. Like lens shift is literal lens shift. So there's vignetting cuz the image is way over here. Okay, I think that's as good as it's getting. Elijah, are you going to be able to get in here? Oh yeah. Oh man, I love climbing into my movie theater. I can't tell if it's just cuz this room, but it feels warmer in here. Even since we've just started sitting down and playing. Oh, yeah. Okay. It's still not great. It's not as bad as you thought, though. Now, no. No, it's better than it was. It turns out light control is good for projection, so that's cool. Who would have thought it? Unfortunately, even with the increased brightness, movies still aren't going to pop because it's just too old to support HDR. So, it's just bright SDR. It does have like a very filmic pleasing look, though. Yeah. But is that because of our out of focus? No. No, that's cuz like there's still parts right now where we haven't gotten the focus dialed in. No, no, this is true. But, uh that's that's not all of it. In the middle, it's focused. So, that's the only place I'm looking. I mean, it doesn't help that there's not practically a place we could still put this. Nope. Nowhere. Not your house. Not the tech house. Not here. Like, not even at Whale Land. No. Well, now we know that. But is there a place that we could put this segue to our sponsor? UG Green. 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Check out their Nexo Air lineup and more at the link below. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out some real modern options for projection. They have gotten shockingly good and shockingly affordable at the low to mid end. Like it's unbelievable. That Ben Q absolutely blows the doors off of this old Christy.