I’ve been doing some research for the church on buying a projector. I came up with four criteria I want to gauge this on.
1. Brightness – this is more important than everything else, including cost. We should want to pay more for the right brightness. So far, it looks like 2000 Lumens is the bottom end for our needs. I would prefer 2500 to 3000.
2. Cost – this is obvious, we don’t want to spend a ton of money, but we want decent value, so we’ll spend what we have to, we just don’t want to add a bunch of worthless features because they are “cool”. For my home projector in my dream house I would add features because they are cool….but it is my dream house, not reality.
3. Keystone Correction – I identified this in my research as something that is necessary. This is the ability to project onto a surface from an odd angle, but it corrects the picture to adjust for the angle. This is really good if we are going to put this on a cart to keep it mobile.
4. Connectivity – Here I want to connect to as much stuff as possible. I think it would be wise to allow for future expansion by getting a projector w/ more connectors so that down the road we can still be hooking it to the latest laptops or desktops and DVD players. But there is a problem I discovered today. This article from my favorite technology review website is previewing the new style of connector that is poised to become the standard for everything. That means DVD players, hooking to Surround sound receivers to computers to TV’s….everything. The problem? Well, it is very new, and we need the projector by early next month, so the likelihood of me finding it soon is not good, especially in our price range. This connector style would be really really good for us to, with simplifying our cabling, and combining 8 channel audio and up to 1080p video into a single cable is awesome. This is going to replace all of your cables going to your TV except maybe your one coming from the wall for the cable company to your TV. So read the article if you want a little more info on how your TV is going to change in the next five years.
Well, at any rate, I was wondering if any of my tech friends have done any research on this kind of thing. I’m thinking other than those four things the ability to do 1024 x 768 resolution is a good thing to look for as well. Let me know if any of you know much about these, especially as they relate to rooms w/ 50 to 75 people in them w/ no control over the lighting (means it has to be bright). I’m going to compile a list in various price ranges sometime this week I think, so I need to entertain as many good websites w/ reviews as possible, and good websites for buying these things. I’m also mildly interested in screens and how they improve the quality of the picture…I’ve heard mixed reviews, so I want to know what people think.
Thank you, and I’m going back to installing windows from across a network using my newly acquired Windows PE cd….if you don’t know what that is tough, cuz I’m not telling you. It’s fun working for an OEM company, I get windows PE disks every third copy of windows XP or server 2003 we sell.
rschmit says
Talk to Dan. He’d probably have a lot of insight into this area.