Nyrius Wireless HDMI Sender

I purchased this item after carefully researching and weighing all the available options for HDMI transmission over the large distance in our theatre. Those included Dual Cat 6e Baluns, Fiber-Optic Convertors, and Wireless HDMI transmitter/receiver pairs. I would warn anyone trying to use the first option in a public theatre because the cable length limitation (usually only 100') is just not long enough if you want the Blu-Ray/DVD player located on the stage or projection booth with the projector suspended in the ceiling typically in a 1000 to 3000 seat venue for front projection. In addition, those cables cannot be run parallel to AC lines or in a high RF environment (such as a place where many lighting dimmer circuits are used, well DUH, it's a theatre and that's the normal lighting usage) and it states that quite clearly in the manual. Our projector is hung from a balcony rail with lots of AC runs on it and the Cat 6e Balun didn't work AT ALL despite having both Cat 6e runs of identical length, using high quality well-terminated ends, and avoiding AC lines. I looked into a Fiber-Optic convertor interface. At almost $1,200, it was just too expensive. Enter the Nyrius Aries NAVS500 unit. At $200 it seemed like a good (reasonably) affordable choice... if it worked. After reading all the reviews, I decided to give it a try. I wasn't disappointed. Many of the negative reviews cited the unit not working right out of the box. That's fair enough. It seems like a quality-control issue at worst. The company should work on that. I was able to purchase a refurbished unit at a discount so I figured it had been gone over and tested thoroughly before I got it. I initially hooked up my top-of-the-line Oppo Digital BP-83 Blu-Ray player (which normally syncs perfectly to my HD home theatre projector) and it didn't work! The Sanyo XL-FP42 (8K Lumen) projector displayed a sync rate of 480P with a nasty stripe through the middle of an unwatchable picture. I was crestfallen until I discovered much later why that had happened. My co-worker had a much cheaper Samsung Blu-Ray (around $300) and it was able to sync at 720P. We were making progress but still not quite at our goal of 1080i, the projector's highest supported rate. Just for giggles we hooked up the theatre's very cheap ($150) Samsung Blu-Ray player and to our surprise and delight, the projector synched to it INSTANTLY at 1080i! We couldn't believe it. We played an entire movie and the link never failed or lost sync once. It was incredible and ironic. The cheapest player performed the best! At first we decided to place that Blu-Ray player within 25' of the projector with no obstructions. When we got the el cheapo Samsung player to sync, we moved it to the stage where we normally set it up (through a much lower-res interface). This is an as-the-crow-flies distance of approximately 90' with a big CONCRETE AND STEEL proscenium wall in the direct line-of-sight between them. We fired everything up and it again synched at 1080i and stayed there with no glitches. Unbelievable! We then decided to go for broke. I had the head electrician fire up EVERY lighting circuit dimmer in the building. Several hundred RF-pumping, EMF-saturating, mega-interference-generating AC runs soaked the ether. The picture looked perfect and stayed that way despite our constantly changing the levels of the lights in an attempt to disrupt the link. We were ready to use it for a real show. The next week we tested everything successfully and a few days later we used the Nyrius ARIES NAVS500 for a live event where a movie was the centerpiece. It worked perfectly and we are now cautiously confident that we've got a winner. I will update this review as we do more shows (we don't use the projector on a daily or even weekly basis), so stay tuned. I suspect (but haven't fully tested the hypothesis) that the synching protocol between Blu-Ray players and the Nyrius ARIES NAVS500 differs greatly from player to player. I want to set my Oppo Blu-Ray to 1080i instead of "Auto" and see if I can get it to sync at that rate. I also would like to do the same with my co-worker's mid-priced Samsung Blu-Ray. And I would like to test a few other players for good measure. I will perform these experiments soon and revise this review accordingly. I would HIGHLY recommend anyone using this unit in a public theatre to have several Blu-Ray players on hand because of this issue. In addition, I would use the shortest possible HDMI cables to get into and out of the Nyrius units. That's just good practice. This unit gets two enthusiastic thumbs up from me despite it not working with two out of three players we tested it with. That question will be resolved one way or another. Here is some last advice: Turn on the receiver FIRST, then turn on the transmitter, then the Blu-Ray, and finally turn on the projector. Do not disconnect the HDMI connection when it has synched because it may not re-synch. If you do happen to disconnect it, power down the transmitter, hook the HDMI back up and power the transmitter back up again. That solved it for me. Thanks for making a good workable unit Nyrius!