Home Theater Projectors

Projecting movies and HDTV

So you’ve decided you want a dedicated home theater and you’d rather not clutter it up with all the substantial hardware making up a rear projection TV. Thanks to the ever-decreasing costs and size of technology, a front projection display system may be more affordable and convenient than you think. The screen takes up little more than the wall space it covers, most home theater projectors are fairly small and lightweight, and the whole system can cost less than a big screen projection television.

One key thing you should consider when you’re setting up your home theater is how much light will be in the room. You’ll get the most vivid picture in a room with low ambient light, while a bright room will make a dark scene from a movie look washed out or grayish. A brighter projector will help but can’t make your projector’s blacks project any darker. A gray screen is another option for combating washed out blacks.

Besides the amount of ambient light in your projection room, a few other factors - including room size and shape and the size of your viewing area - will have an impact on which projection system is right for your home cinema.

High definition television

You’d be hard pressed to find a projector today that doesn’t overshoot the resolution of conventional TV, which is the same as the signal from your DVD player - 480 visible lines of resolution. Where the DVD player offers a step up is in progressive scanning, which means all 480 lines are visible at once (480p). In standard television, or interlaced scanning (480i), you only see every other line at the same time, even if your eye is too slow to realize it.

Digital TV starts at 480p, but there are higher resolution HDTV signals as well - primarily 720p and 1080i. While the resolution of HDTV is measured in lines, a digital projector doesn’t produce lines but pixels, so it has to convert the TV signal to its own native resolution. The conversion may lose you some a little sharpness or detail, but any XGA projector or better will give you a higher-res image than standard TV.

All this resolution isn’t much good unless you have the cables and connections to communicate the video signal to your projector, so make sure your projection system has, at minimum, an S-video input. Component video is even better (providing your DVD player will output it) but for HDTV, you’ll want one (or both) of the digital connection formats - DVI (Digital Video Interface) and HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface).