The Bigger Picture: Projectors

Looking to supersize your home theatre experience? With projectors, you can get close to the drama of an HD movie or feel the spine-tingling tension as you take your opponents on in a game of hand-to-hand combat. Not all projectors are created equal, however, and with an enormous image, you’ll be less forgiving of skewed angles and ghosting. Here’s your guide to high-def heaven.

If you’re in the market for a projector one of the first questions you have to ask yourself is: “Am I more focused on business or pleasure?”. Although the divide between business and home theatre units is converging, for the ultimate in high definition video output and a mean gaming experience, you’re going to want the advanced technology and solid housing that comes with the home theatre option. With projectors the more you spend really does equate to better technology so invest in something that’s going to see you through the next few innovations.

The high definition experience

The higher the resolution, the sharper the picture and nowadays with 3D and HDTV set to dominate the lounges of the world, you really should be looking at a full HD 1080p projector (1,920 x 1,080). Almost all home projectors now have a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio for movie display.

Lumen-osity

The measure of brightness in projectors is defined as lumens. Home theatre projectors don’t require as much brightness if you can dim your living room and black out the windows. If you have to compromise, look for 2,000 lumens.

Compatible connections

Choose a projector with connections that are compatible with your existing Blu-ray player, Freeview HD or Sky TV HDi decoder. Many projectors are also compatible with gaming consoles. An HDMI connection with HDCP compatibility is the ultimate for high-def as it is a digital to digital connection from the source to the projector. Component video can also carry high-def but is an analogue connection that requires conversion from digital to analogue and then back again, degrading image quality on the way.

Throw

If you don’t want to sit in your neighbour’s house to watch the movie in your lounge, work out the ‘throw’. A short throw can produce a big picture (100-inches is good) from even just a couple of metres away, ideal for a small room. If you want to mount your projector at the back of your living room pick a projector with a long throw.

Mounts

Some projectors have proprietary mounts rather than the industry standard VESA mounts. If you have plans to permanently ceiling mount your projector check this to avoid having to shell out extra cash. While you’re at it, budget for a decent screen and if you’re going as far as installing an automatic drop-down screen, you’ll want your projector to have a 12V trigger output.

Keystone correction

A petite lounge and wonky table stand make for a skewed pic. Keystone correction straightens the edges of a picture when the projector is not directly in front of the screen. However, as a digital process, keystone adds additional processing to the final image, which is not ideal. You can try to find a projector with optical image shifting - lenses you can physically move both vertically and horizontally to line up the image.

LCD vs DLP

LCD projectors use three LCD panels, each panel passing a primary colour that is then combined into a single image. DLP uses a single micro-mirror device to sequentially reflect each primary colour from a spinning colour wheel. There are various pros and cons with both LCD and DLP technology. For instance, while DLP projectors often have lower quoted contrast ratios than LCD projectors, they often produce better blacks.

DLP projectors have their own issues to look out for, though, most notably the rainbow effect, where the internal colour wheel can cause stripes of red, green and blue to appear over very bright parts of an image, or in your peripheral vision. Plus you can also sometimes see gentle dot crawl over black colours, and fizzing noise over fast-moving skin tones.