How to choose the right projector

By Adrian Bruyes


Projectors provide the ultimate home theater experience. Nothing else comes as close to truly re-creating the viewing experience of a movie theater. Imagine the bewitching beauty of Avatar's planet Pandora spread out before you. Or a close-up shot of Jeff Beck's fingers coaxing delicate harmonics out of his Stratocaster. Picture a 240-pound linebacker barreling straight at you. Or a video game villain swinging a sword big enough to splinter your coffee table. Projectors deliver all that and more - images bursting with cinematic detail and color across a larger-than-life screen measured in feet, not inches.

Tip: In many cases, manufacturers rate projector lumen values based on data output, not video. Lumen output for video is typically not as high as data. For help determining which projector is right for your viewing environment, contact one of our Projector Experts. They have personally seen most units perform in video mode. What you are watching will make a big difference in the quality of your image. A low-quality signal fed to your projector will most likely look like a low-quality image when projected. This is even more noticeable on a larger screen.

If you have a home theater room that is very dark, a projector with a lumens rating of under 1,500 will tend to provide an adequate picture. Media presentations given in dim light typically require about 1,500 to 2,000 lumens, and a room with regular ambient lighting may require a projector with over 2,000 lumens to provide a good picture.

So what does that mean for your projector purchase? HD (1920 x 1080) projectors are designed to deliver all the rich details carried in a 1080p signal. Wide XGA projectors will deliver great results when fed a 1080p signal, just not as great as their HD counterparts. That said, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two unless you were projecting a very large image, say eight feet diagonal or more. The final factor to consider is a projector's contrast ratio. Contrast ratio literally refers to the difference between the blackest black and the whitest white in an image.

Aside from screen size, and deciding between a manual pull-down, motorized retractable, or fixed-frame design, the other major consideration is screen "gain." Gain measures the amount of light reflected by the screen back at viewers - higher gain means more reflected light and a brighter image. Different screen coatings applied to the base vinyl screen material are how different gain values are achieved. Higher brightness is helpful with very large screens, or in rooms with significant ambient light, but as the screen gain increases, the optimum viewing angle decreases - it becomes more important that viewers sit more directly in front of the screen rather than off to the sides.




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