Video:What to Look for When Buying a Video Projector

Transcript:What to Look for When Buying a Video Projector

Hi, I'm Bob Murphy, Branch Manager here at Listen Up Audio and Video in Boulder, Colorado. I am here for About.com, and I am going to be talking about what to look for when buying a video projector.

Prices for Video Projectors

There is a broad price range between the entry level and the top of the line in home theater use. Lower end smaller projectors are often designed to be used in boardrooms where the only criteria is that it shoots a bright enough picture that you can read the PowerPoint from the back of the room.

Size of Video Projector

When buying a video projector, you first want to look at the room it is going to be placed in. You want to look at several factors. How much lighting is there in the room? How much light can you control in the room? How many people are going to be watching this screen? Do you want an intimate microtheater with two seats, or do you want an eight or ten seat theater with multiple levels? The same projector that will fill a five foot screen, or a four foot screen in a boardroom is just not going to give you a convincing picture in a ten foot projection in a basement, or a dedicated home theater.

Video Projectors' Brightness and Contrast

In an LCD, LCOS or DILA system, you want to get the one with the brightest picture, if you are going to a bigger picture. In a DLP system, we would go up to a three chip DLP in order to shoot a bigger picture.

Contrast ratio is very important to get a home theater experience because we want it to look as natural as possible. That means deep blacks should be deep black, and a bright sky, or a bright light, should be bright. In order to do that you have to have a combination of things. You have to have a projector that can resolve that  much light, and resolve that much contrast, and you have to have a screen that can control that, and you have to have control of your ambient lighting in the room.

DLP typically gives you a better black level, so your contrast range is preserved, because it can go to pure black. Initially, that was a huge difference between the two. More and more, they have come up with ways of getting you a decent black level on the LCD style of projector, to where it is actually very comparable.

Portability of Video Projectors

The advantage of these new smaller devices like LCD and DLP is that they lend themselves to portability. Lots of folks will take movie night outside in the summer, and the zoom lens makes it easy to dial into whatever screen size, or positioning that you have. If you have a local dealer that specializes in audio/video and installations, very often they will come out and look over the room and give you helpful tips even before you have spent any money.

The video projector is still the best way to show a real movie theater experience. We can put a projector on one side of the room and a screen on the other side and show a ten foot wide picture that really rivals what you can see at the local multiplex. 

Thanks so much for watching. For more information about home theater, please visit us at About.com.