Choosing a digital projector

There are now digital projectors for every sector of the market, be it the home market for movies and gaming or the business and commercial market for presentations. Having so many projectors on the market does tend to confuse matters when you’re looking buy one so this article is intended as a guide the features you should look out for on a digital projector.

You will need to know what you want your projector for, one aimed for business users may not be suitable for home use, it would do the job for sure but you may have been able to get better features for your money. Let’s take a look at which features to look out for:

 You will need to match the resolution of the projector to the resolution of the source of information. For example, a projector intended for business use would primarily be used with a computer. The images on right show the relevant computer screen resolutions that you should try to match your computer to, click to enlarge them.

A digital video projector for home movie use would have quite different resolutions, pay particular attention to the High Definition resolutions, you will need a HD digital projector to play movies at those resolutions.

Contrast ratio is one of the most important stats when considering which projector to buy. In terms of business and leisure use you cannot get a big enough contrast ratio. In this case bigger is better. Contrast ratio is the ratio between the darkest and lightest bits of a picture i.e. the black and white bit. A projector will always suffer from ambient light in a room making the picture look faded and it is for this reason the contrast ratio needs to be as high as possible. Some home cinema projectors will produce a contrast ratio of 75000:1, now that’s what you’re looking for!

For home cinemas brightness is not king. More often than not you will be able to control the ambient light in the room. In a business situation it is unlikely that you will want to plunge your audience in to darkness. The brightness of projector you require will be determined by the distance of the projector to the projector screen. The further the projector is from the screen the greater the brightness will need to be.

Home cinema projectors will range from 900 and 1200 lumens, a 900 lumen projector will need to have the ambient light controlled by the use of blind etc a 1200 lumen projector will cope sufficiently with low ambient light levels.

For business use you would be looking for a projector with 1200 lumens minimum in a small room and to be able to leave the lights on. In medium sized room about 2000 and in a larger room at least 3500.

Business projectors will generally have your standard VGA monitor cable connection. A home cinema projector on the other hand is likely to have far more connections on it. If you have High Definition (HD) sources then you should really be looking for a HDMI connector on it. Most digital projectors will have component RGB inputs which can be used with virtually any source.

Well, this debate rages on, they are basically two different forms of technology, I won’t go in to the differences here, the actual visual differences between them have got significantly narrower over the years. In terms of advantages and disadvantages here goes:

• LCD projectors quieter than the DLP variety
• LCD may have ‘dead pixels’ on screen, this is very unlikely with DLP.
• LCD colors are more life like than DLP
• DLP may have a rainbowing effect, this is as much down to personal usage, some people claim not to see this effect.
• LCD have better contrast ratios.
• DLP has a smoother onscreen picture than LCD.

As you can see it’s 6 of one half a dozen of the other. Go and see if you can tell the difference.

The cost of projector bulbs is one of the biggest issues that home users have to consider. They cost between $200 - $400 to replace, it’s for this reason that many people do not use their projector for watching TV.  The typical half life of a bulb is 2000 – 4000 hours, what that means is that if you have a 4000 hour bulb, when you get to 4000 hours the bulb will be half as bright as the day you first switched it on.

For both business and leisure use digital projectors I wouldn’t pay any notice to any sound features a projector has. In my experience they always sound very poor in quality and you are better off routing the sound through your laptop or hi-fi.

There are many digital projector reviews online and I would recommend reading them before making your purchase. Buying your projector online will ensure that you have the widest possible range to choose from.