A Beginner's Guide to Projectors So you've decided you want a projector, but you do not know where to start? Do not panic, in reality, there are only a few simple decisions you need to do, to know what projectors will be for you. Before you begin, you want to decide if you want to use your new projector for displaying movies, playing video games, or giving presentations. This will affect how bright or dark your viewing room and what resolutions you need, plus things like connection options. Also work where you want to place your projector relative to its screen.
To begin, you should consider brightness and contrast. Most projectors have declared their brightness in two ways, Lumens and foot-Lamberts. Unfortunately, the lumen rating is not a really useful way of brightness, as they often ignore the display size of the final image or reduction due to normal rather than max usage . In the darkness, as a dedicated home theater room, to find a brightness rating of around 40 fL, and increase with the additional quantity of ambient light in your viewing room will.
The contrast is often a more useful measure of the quality of projector brightness. A high quality projector has a contrast ratio of 5,000:1 or more, all well check to see if the projector uses an iris "dynamic" to help strengthen its range of contrast. This work, by limiting the production of light in dark scenes, which allows the projector to produce "black". Many of these projectors will also include "on / off" contrast, which is the difference between a black and white screen text. A better ANSI contrast, which uses a checkerboard pattern, and measures the difference between the squares of light and darkness. This value will not be affected by any dynamic iris, and is generally a lower value.
Then you need to think about supported resolutions that you want to view. The best is 1080p, so called "full HD, and you will see Blu-ray and other high definition content properly. Most games and computer presentations must 720p or 1024x768, so if you will not be primarily watching movies, save money and go for a lower spec model. 720p and 1080p are both 16:9 widescreen resolutions, while 1024x768 is 4:3, which is a more standard square used by many computer monitors and TV. Consider the screen you will see on. For full use of the screen, make sure it matches the resolution of your projector.
Finally, take note of the "throw distance" of the projector. "Short Throw" projectors are designed to be placed closer to the screen and still produce a great image, while "long range" The projectors are the opposite. Also cited is the amount of zoom available, which will increase or decrease the image somewhat. Another useful feature on most projectors is lens-shift. This will allow you more flexibility in placing the projector to the screen allowing you to move the image from top to bottom or left and right by a certain amount without distorting the image.
Posted on March 22, 2010.