http://www.spacelas.com
http://shop.spacelas.com
Chinese projectors. There, I've said it, have your little tantrums and come back in 5 minutes
Right, now you can say "I told you so". Happy now? Well let's assume so and get on with the review. I was actually the proud owner of a pair of 1W Spacelas RGBs, and decided, when moving a step up the ladder to 2W, to give them my business again. The build quality of my 1Ws was good, the cases were small and neat inside and outside, and the projectors were set up perfectly and near-identically, with a lovely cold bluey-white.
So: the 2W projectors. For the record, they are Xmaxs. I paid a quite reasonable 1350 GBP each, including shipping and flight cases. I don't like the way these companies use Paypal in a dodgy way for exchanging funds. They don't show the "PayPal guarantee" so there's not much comeback if it goes pear-shaped. Spacelas do have an online store (shop.spacelas.com) so actually look a bit more credible than most Chinese merchants, but I am now of the opinion that this is a facade.
I hoped the new lasers would live up to the quality of their smaller cousins. They did not. They are still smaller and lighter than I might have expected, and though not quite as neat looking as the 1Ws, they're neat enough. But the biggest problem by far was that the green on one of the projectors was much weaker than the other. The (Quickshow) target beams were about 40% dimmer, something I only noticed during my first show when the 2 were side-by-side. The white balance was poor, too, somewhat too bluey in general but the difference in green showed markedly too.
So after the show I emailed Spacelas. I did not get a reply for a whole week. That's pretty poor, really. And of course, they weren't even remotely interested in helping (certainly not now they have my money). They didn't even offer a refund or replacement or a fix. But Sam, the dude who sold me the gear, did inform me that the projectors had a different green in them - one 800mW, the other 600mW, and that this was probably what I was seeing.
Hmmm. Well I'm not convinced. My 300mW greens looked a bit brighter that the (alleged) 600mW one, but of course there could be an issue with optical alignment or driver setup too, so I am now looking into this. I have informed Spacelas that I will invoice them for any money I have to fork out to get the projectors up to spec, but I think I would be wildly optimistic if I thought they'd honour that. So yes, these may well be my last Chinese projectors, because there is no substitute for customer service when you're forking out thousands of GBP. There's also no substitute for a meticulous assembly procedure - simply using whatever is lying around, rather than standard parts, is not a good sign. Even if the 800 and the 600 weren't vastly different (they're meant to be supplying ~500mW to the total output), their analogue characteristics over the input range would be different. And there is no substitute for a good QA department who will say "sorry guys, this isn't up to scratch" after a thorough test. Sorry Spacelas, you "forgot" that the customer is king.