On Friday, January 27, 2012 6:44:53 PM UTC-7, BeeJ wrote:
The "brightness" figure for a projector is given in lumens, but that's a me= asure of the light energy leaving the lens; it's one factor in determining the pe= rceived brightness of the image, the others being the screen size, the scre= en "gain," and the ambient light level in the viewing room. Without knowing= those, the only advice someone could give you would be to get the projecto= r with the biggest output spec in lumens that you could afford, but there's= a significant chance that you'd wind up buying excessive brightness at the= expense of other features.
Not much choice here, really. You're going to want 1920 x 1080 pixels, and= that's pretty much all you'd find anyway. Lower resolution projectors won= 't do Blu-ray discs justice, at least not on a larger screen.
Absolutely. First - how far will the projector be located from the screen?= You need to make sure the optics of the projector (the projection lens sy= stem) are capable of producing the desired image size at that distance. Al= so, unless the projector can be mounted such that it is facing the screen "= squarely" (i.e., a line from the projector lens to the screen is perpendicu= lar to both), you will wind up with a distorted image (look up "keystone di= stortion" for an example). Some projectors can correct for this, if such c= orrection is needed.
You should also look into the basic imaging technology used by the projecto= r. Lots of projectors today use Texas Instrument's "Digital Light Processi= ng" (DLP) technology, in which the image is formed on a chip carrying liter= ally a couple of million tiny little square mirrors. But this technology do= esn't inherently provide a color image, so to get full color images you eit= her need to show the red, green, and blue images on a single chip in rapid = succession (called "field-sequential color") or use three of these imaging = chips, one for each color. The three-chip types are obviously going to be = more expensive, but provide the best image and avoid a problem that's inher= ent in the single-chip designs known as "color breakup" or the "rainbow eff= ect." Some people are very sensitive to this effect, in which you will per= ceive colored fringes around moving objects within the image, or if you mov= e your head rapidly such that the image moves across your field of vision. = If you're not overly sensitive to the problem (I'm not, personally), singl= e-chip projectors will be fine choices; if you are, you may need to look fo= r a three-chip design or use some other imaging technology. LCDs are the o= ther major imaging device common found in consumer projection. They typica= lly don't provide the high contrast of the DLP imagers, and have an overall= different "look" to the image. Shop and compare.)
Finally, you'll need to consider other features that may be of concern to y= ou. Top of that list is likely what inputs you need: HDMI is the de-facto = standard digital interface for HDTV today, but you may also need the projec= tor to be able to handle the older analog TV connections standards (composi= te or component video, typically using "RCA" jacks, or "S-Video" which is t= ypically on a DIN connector) or to accept video from personal computers (wh= ich may provide HDMI, but which might also use VGA, DVI, or DisplayPort out= puts; of those, only DVI is directly compatible with HDMI).
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