Customize the Splash Screen on your Hitachi Video Projector

Hitachi video projectors have a nifty feature called MyScreen. This is an advanced feature which intrigued me in the past, but I had put off using in practice. This summer, however, I am loading up all of my MyScreen-enabled projectors with the same image.

The MyScreen feature lets you create a splash screen to replace the default HITACHI blue screen that is normally displayed upon power-up or when there is no signal.

Uploading the image to the projector is a snap.  I created my image using PowerPoint, although any image editing program will do. Then, turn your video projector on and tune it to the appropriate RGB input to display the computer image. Find the MyScreen menu selection, and within a few clicks, the projector will start capturing your image to its permanent memory.

There is a catch: the image captured by the projector is only 640 by 480 pixels. The Hitachi manual does not really specify this constraint. If you are running a higher resolution, you will be given a 640 by 480 block to move around the screen to pick the final image. Since I wanted the whole screen to be captured, I set my PowerPoint presentation to display in 640 by 480 resolution.

There are several options involved with the MyScreen feature. For example, you can choose whether to display the MyScreen image during power-up or lost signal, and whether to display the MyScreen image each time you hit the BLANK button on your remote. You can lock your customized screen to make it to difficult to accidentally erase it, and on later models, you can even protect it with a password.

I believe network-capable Hitachi projectors have even more MyScreen features, like the ability to push to a customized splash screen to all projectors (or any image or short presentation) over the network. The prospect of adding a network drop to all of our rooms just for projector maintenance seems far down the road, so I have not purchased projectors with this feature.

Happy splashing!