Actually I agree. I my experience with this sort of thing (delivering technology) is that sadly this is typical. The manufacturer thinks it's sorted out, releases (generally under pressure from accounting and/or marketing), finds unexpected issues, resolves those, has OEMs or vendors that find new unexpected issues, resolves those....

The 950 is an excellent example.

I'm tired of being an unpaid beta tester. I'm waiting until it's really sorted out.

At this point from what I've read TI has done a very good job of identifing and quantifying the causes for DMD failures. They say that the #1 cause is (drum roll) dirt. Basically.

At first I was surprized, but when you think about it dirt is the traditional enemy of all things mechanical. According to the post-mortem results crud can get either under the mirror and block it, under an edge and make it sticky or wedge above the mirror. According to TI operational cycles have almost nothing to do with it, and hinge failures just don't happen. This is very good news to me, because it indicates that (1) TI is actively addressing the issue and (2) it is not an intrinsic design flaw.

One thing I saw and didn't like was the fact that on the larger DLP screens I could clearly see the individual pixels and even the 'structure' of the mirror within the pixel. That's just not cool. Maybe AzRyans' idea of a bit of intentional 'out of focus' would work to cure that - it certainly would seem to have merit. Also on that vein there are optical filters for other applications that are designed specifically to 'soften' the image transmitted by a lens. I wonder if that might do the job without chromatic aberation?

The smaller (under 60") DLPs I saw looked fine, as did the HD1 65" RP Mitsubishi. I wonder if the screen material could be made to help out as well on FP units?

This looks very interesting to me:

http://www.optomatv.com/index.asp

But it's not applicable to your needs I bet.

Have a good one!