If you are a fan of series or movies, surely more than once it has crossed your mind to mount a home cinema. Enjoying a good sound system and a good projector can certainly enhance the experience. Before choosing a projector, we must know what are the main characteristics to take into account. Instead of just leaving you a list of best quality-price projectors, we prefer to give you the tools to find the best projector for your living room.
👉 Which is better, HDMI or DisplayPort? 👈
Table of Contents
Projector brightness
The light output of a projector is measured in ANSI lumens. This parameter indicates the amount of light that the projector can emit on a certain surface.
To know what brightness the projector should offer, we must know how to take into account the conditions of the room. The greater the amount of natural light in the room, the more light we need. Other aspects to take into account are the resolution and the projection distance, but we will touch on this later.
Normally we will need between 2000 lumens and 3000 lumens. 2000 lumens is recommended for enclosed spaces without windows, such as basements. For rooms with closed shutters about 2500 lumens is recommended and for rooms with open shutters about 3000 lumens.
Projector Contrast
This parameter indicates the maximum difference between brightness between black and white. A 2000: 1 ratio, which tells us that the lightest point is 2000 times lighter than the darkest point. How logical, the higher the contrast, the better the image quality and the more realistic.
If we want to obtain intense and quality blacks, we will need a high contrast. Also, since we are going to enjoy the content with a minimum level of ambient light, we will need a high contrast to have more vivid and realistic colors.
Minimum contrast for a projector: 5000: 1
Projector resolution
It tells us the number of pixels that an image will contain. The higher the pixel density, the sharper the image. The resolution will depend on the end use of the projector, in our case, multimedia.
Currently any resolution lower than FullHD is no longer interesting. We can find in the market many cheap FullHD projectors that will give us a good result. Note that this resolution is staying more for gaming than for multimedia.
For those who want a home theater, the perfect resolution is 4K (3840 × 2160 pixels). There is more and more content in this resolution and the difference with FullHD is very noticeable.
Loudness the projector
It is the amount of noise that the projector produces, more specifically, the fan to dissipate heat. The circuitry and especially the lamp tend to get hot and require heat dissipation. We must look for a projector that offers us a loudness below 30dBA.
We must bear in mind that the size of the projector will have a lot to do with the loudness. Projectors intended for home theater are usually quite large and offer values below 30dB.
Brightness is an important factor at this point. The higher the luminosity, the more loud. It is due to the lamp, since being more powerful, it generates more heat and needs greater heat dissipation, as we said.
Visualization system
DLP
Digital Light Processing (DLP) is based on millions of tiny mirrors that project light onto a screen. Each mirror is a point of light, which with a tilting movement, allows the generation of a wide range of colors with a good contrast ratio.
By means of this rather final mirror structure, the resulting image is very fine and no gridding of the image appears. This technology requires little space, ideal for small projectors. DLPs have a closed system, so they require little or no maintenance.
- They offer high contrast
- The text is quite sharp and the lines are very beautiful
- They have fairly durable DMD chips
- Subtle flashes of colors known as the rainbow effect are perceived
- You can hear, on some models, the colored wheels
- Color accuracy is poor
LCD
Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology is based on a primary white light that is divided into the three primary colors: red, green and blue, which in turn pass through three LCD screens. The images are then combined to provide a complete image with all colors.
This technology offers us more vivid, natural colors and with greater definition. It has the problem that they can generate slight saturation in the blacks. Cinema projectors are based on this technology, but have optimized black levels.
- Great image quality and color accuracy
- A very precise definition of the pixels
- Brighter than DLP technology
- It can give the grid or wire effect, which is nothing more than seeing fine lines that separate the pixels
- Resist enough maintenance
D-ILA, LCoS and SXRD
They are the same technology, but named by each manufacturer in a different way (with minimal differences in their construction). Direct-Drive Image Light Amplification (D-ILA) is the name JVC uses. Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) is the name Canon uses. Silicon X-tal Reflective Display (SXRD) is the name Sony uses.
This technology, in terms of operation, is similar to LCD. What the panels do here is reflect the light instead of letting it pass. We could say that it is a combination of DLP and LCD technologies.
- Designed for high resolutions, especially 4K
- Does not have a grid effect
- It offers us a great contrast
- The amount of lumens is lower than the other technologies
- They are still quite expensive
Connections
Most projectors will come with a large number of video connectors, although that will not give us much the same. What interests us above all is that they have HDMI and DisplayPort, especially the latter. HDMI is lagging behind DisplayPort, which is more versatile and supports technologies like variable frequency. If you have DVI, VGA or S-Video, fine, but we will hardly use them.
Something that may interest us a lot is that it has USB ports. This will allow us to connect memories directly to the projector, something that can be interesting.
We can find projectors that offer Bluetooth and WiFi. This may be of interest to some, as it allows for wireless content playback. Those that support these technologies tend to be more expensive.
