Review on Roland V 1HD HD Video Switcher by Andrew Kay

I've just started playing around with this switcher and trying to explore all of its little possibilities. I misunderstood the possibilities of MIDI. It won't work like I thought it would with our old MIDI lighting technique. Everything else about this switch works exactly as expected. $995 is a great price. I'll probably swap my old Edirol mixer for this new Roland after the holidays. That should save us 6 inputs on the sound card and make the picture on the projectors cleaner. Update 2017-05: I liked it so much that I kept it to myself. So I ordered a second one for the church. I hooked up a second one at church tonight. I couldn't convert the main output from HDMI to VGA because the projectors complained about the source video format error. I had to settle for an HDMI to RCA converter to connect two projectors in front of an audience + a TV in a coffee shop. Surprisingly it had a better picture than the old Edirol switch even though it still used an RCA video cable. Everything was working great until I connected the back of the projector to a second HDMI to RCA adapter and then to the Roland switcher's preview out port. All videos on Master out and Preview out no longer work. I've been messing around with it for 30-40 minutes to no avail. No matter what I did, I couldn't get a stable video signal on the main or preview output until I unplugged the HDMI cable coming out of the preview port. I then grabbed a 2-way active HDMI splitter and hooked up a spare computer monitor so I could see what I was doing without breaking my neck trying to watch the preview video on the back wall and lo and behold , the whole video magically started working flawlessly. For some reason the whole system required an extra 5 volts to be fed into the HDMI circuitry. I suspect the 2 HDMI to RCA adapters needed that little extra juice. I ended up unplugging the spare monitor and leaving the 2-way HDMI splitter in place to provide the extra 5 volts and all seems fine. Hope everything goes well next weekend. I don't want to give up all the extra space we just gained by replugging the old Edirol switch.