If you are like all of us at Audio Advice and think you just don’t get that real home theater experience unless you have a large screen, you’ve likely come to the realization that you need a home theater projector to get a truly immersive experience.

In this educational article, we will go over all the things you need to consider when trying to find the best front projection system for your home theater or family room. We have put together a pretty straightforward decision tree to help you quickly determine your ideal front projector choice.

Widescreen or 16:9

The first step is to decide if you want to have a traditional HDTV aspect ratio of 16:9 or a widescreen like you would find at a movie theater. In general, if you watch a lot of movies, you should go for a widescreen experience, and if you almost solely watch sports and news, then you might be fine with a regular 16:9 screen.

This is such an important decision that we have a full video reviewing the differences in 16:9 & 2.4:1 Aspect Ratios.

Projectors capable of widescreen will need one of two features. The most common one is lens memory. This lets you set the projector up for a 16:9 ratio for standard TV and another one in widescreen for most movies. These are easily accessed with the projector’s remote control or a smart remote. So you hit a button, and the projector will project a 16:9 image that fills the screen from top to bottom for sports and news. Then you can hit a button that will zoom out the projector to fill the full screen for widescreen movies. Most projectors can move between memory positions in about 5-10 seconds. There are also now multiple aspect ratios in between but suffice it to say that you can hit a button and get the best of both worlds. If you want this capability, look for a projector with what is called lens memory. We list this and all other important specifications in our projector specifications.

Choose Your Screen Size

The size of your screen also greatly impacts the projector you choose. As screens get larger, you need more light output to provide a beautiful image that feels like what you see in a commercial cinema. Our free home theater design tool shows you the brightness level for any combination of screens and projectors you might consider. This is such an important decision, we suggest you read our article on finding the right-sized screen and then use our free design tool to map out your room. If you are reading this and are just upgrading your projector, you can also just go straight to our projector throw distance calculator, which does the same work for you without going through the audio and seating setup.

We have taken our years of experience in real home theaters along with the THX and SMPTE suggestions to help you zero in on the ideal size screen based on where you like to sit in a movie theater.

Every projector has a range of throw distances, which is the shortest to the longest distance they can be from a screen to produce the size image you want to achieve. Our design tool will show you the entire range, including if you need to put the projector behind the back wall to achieve the image size you want.

The other part of the screen size equation is sightlines. A room with good sightlines will enable every seat to see the entire screen without anyone’s head blocking the image. Sightlines are not an issue with just one row of seats or a large couch, but they become super important when you start doing more than one row. The shorter your risers, the higher up your screen will need to be so the back row can see over the front row. Our home theater tool will let you enter all of your room specifications to calculate the exact ideal height of your screen and mounting height of your projector to ensure perfect sightlines in your room.

Learn More About The Importance of Sight Lines in Home Theater Design

Making Sense of Lumens

Lumens is a measure of light that most projector companies use to help people determine how bright their projectors could be. There are several problems with simply using this one spec to decide if a projector fits your needs.

First of all, there are many ways to measure it, which could include putting a light meter right in front of the lens of the projector or using a meter at a typical distance your screen would be from the projector. You can imagine that some manufacturers will also measure the lumens with the projector’s settings changed to positions that would make the picture look terrible yet provide the highest lumen spec. And to further complicate things, the brightness of projectors changes as you move them away from the screen, and some lose more brightness than others.

At Audio Advice, we are perfectionists and want to help people get the best home theater experience possible. So we analyze each projector in our labs and send our customers our set up guides to get the best picture possible from whichever projector you purchase. To help customers choose the right projector, we set up each projector correctly in our labs and tested them so you can see in our home theater design tool how each projector will actually behave at various screen sizes and distances from that sized screen. We even show you what light levels are acceptable for both SDR and HDR content.

What Projector Specs Really Matter and Why

It Is Not Just About The Lumens

It can be really easy to get caught up in a projector's lumen level or brightness level. Remember that many office projectors have high lumens for conference rooms but are terrible at producing great colors or handling movie motion, so you have to look at more than just the lumens.

Look for a Great Video Processor

The processor is a key component in producing a lifelike picture. The problem is, nothing really shows up in the specs to tell you whether the processor is good or bad. You might think that contrast would be one factor you could measure, but there is no standard for measuring contrast and the numbers are all over the map.

The top projector manufacturers invest heavily in great video processors which handle motion, producing a wide color spectrum with millions of colors, contrast, and more. Generally speaking, you get what you pay for in this area.

The Type of Lens Is Important

If you are into photography, you know how important the lens in a camera is. The same holds true for projectors. The better the lens, the more clarity you will get in your image. Better lenses also hold the clarity all the way to the edges of the screen, so there is no blurring in the corners. Generally, glass lenses are superior to other formats, although some companies use an interesting combination of both. Some projector companies are even in the business of producing high-end camera lenses and have a lot of experience in this regard.

This is an area where inexpensive projectors really cut corners, and you will not find out about it until you start wondering why your image only looks good towards the center of the screen.

Gaming Considerations

If you are into video gaming, you will want to find a projector that has an input lag reduction feature for gaming. Turning on this feature will minimize latency but usually has to reduce image processing to achieve low input lag. So there is some sacrifice in the image quality while input lag is reduced. If you are a gamer, look for a projector where you can turn input lag reduction on for gaming and turn it off for watching movies.

Refresh rate increases always seem to be led by the gaming industry. If you want to be on the cutting edge, check out the latest refresh rate for the current video game consoles and look for projectors to handle that rate.

HDR

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. This format gives us an even wider range of colors and bigger differences between the blackest blacks and the whitest whites for an even more lifelike picture. The drawback of HDR is that it requires much more light output and a better video processor to produce a great result. If the projector can not do both of these, you may not even prefer the HDR image and think SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) looks better. With so much content coming out in HDR, this feature is becoming a must-have for a quality projector. If the model you are looking at does not brag about its HDR processing or tone mapping, that likely means the video processor is not very good.

When you are using our projector tool, the brightness bar will tell you if the projector, screen size, and throw distance give you an acceptable HDR light level.

Multi-Chip Projectors

Let’s talk briefly about single-chip versus multi-chip projectors. The top theater projectors all are multi-chip, typically three, so they can produce beautiful discrete colors even with full movie motion. You will sometimes see cheaper projectors from second-tier brands with high lumen levels and not understand why they are so much cheaper. Oftentimes, these are older technology single-chip projectors that you want to stay away from. These are capable of a very bright image, but they fall apart when the image has fast motion, and you see all kinds of artifacts and halo effects. These are not good for home theater, and consequently, you won’t find them in our list of projectors in the home theater design tool.

Pixel Shift

Pixel Shift is a way to simulate a higher resolution image than the projector can produce natively. As technology advances, we usually see some brands use pixel shift to come closer to the current spec before they actually launch projectors with the newest spec. Done right, pixel shift can work pretty well, but don’t fool yourself into thinking you are getting a true 4K or 8K or whatever projector if there is a “shift” or something similar in the technology description. You can always look at the native resolution of the projector to find the truth. If you have the budget, you would rather get a truly 4K or 8k projector.

Lamp or Laser

Laser projectors used to only be at the very high end of the price range but are coming down in price. They usually offer a brighter image and a longer life than a lamp. Most lamp-type projectors will need a new lamp every 1,000-4,000 hours, whereas laser projectors last around 20,000 hours. There is just something more realistic about the image you get from a laser projector. But again, you get what you pay for. If you see a very inexpensive laser projector, the manufacturer has likely cut corners on everything else.

Let's summarize the takeaways here. First, the market for home theater projectors is very competitive, so you generally get what you pay for. If you have room in your budget for a top-of-the-line projector, you will usually want to buy a projector from one of the top names like Sony or JVC. These projectors will generally have great processors, lenses, HDR, and motorized lens shift, so the best of all worlds. If you find that these are outside your budget for the brightness level you need, most people will shift down to a projector with high lumens but use pixel shift to simulate the full resolution. We have projectors at each level in our home theater design tool, so you can easily find the right projector for your budget that works in your room.

Now let’s cover two last items: the first is when to use ultra short throw projectors versus normal projectors, and the second is the key things to understand about projector screens.

Short Throw Projectors

Short-throw projectors allow you to put the projector on a cabinet close to the wall. Most of them are pretty bright and can work well in a room with some light, but you will be limited to a smaller screen size than you can get with a standard projector. But you can still get a very immersive experience in many rooms.

The catch with short-throw projectors is that the projector needs to go where you would normally have the most important speaker in a home theater — which is the center channel. If you are going with a short throw system, make sure the cabinet has a spot under the top shelf where you can place your center channel speaker.

Generally, short-throw projectors are used less in dedicated home theater rooms and more often in family rooms where homeowners want a bigger and more movie-like experience than televisions provide. Still, they can’t do a full projection system because of too much light and people walking through the image.

The Screen Really Matters

Let’s now move on to the importance of the screen. The quality and specifications of the projector screen have a substantial impact on the image and relate to which projector you choose. The best screens provide a very uniform image with no hotspots or abnormalities and let you see all of the features you paid for in your new projector. As you might guess, the better and more perfectly uniform screens will cost more.

There are also two things to think about for the screen material. The first is called screen gain, which is the measure of the reflectivity of a screen. A screen gain of 1 has the same reflectivity as a standard white reference board, whereas a gain of 1.3 will reflect thirty percent more light than a standard white reference board. A 1.3 gain is the most commonly used in most theater rooms, although if you have a very bright projector and a lower gain screen, you can technically achieve an even better picture.

In our home theater design tool and projector throw distance calculator, we allow you to match any screen gain to any projector and see the result, so you don’t have to do any calculations on your own.

Ambient light-rejecting screens allow you to put a projection system into a room that you can not get fully dark. They reflect back the light that is coming from the projector but is designed to minimize the reflection of light from other directions in the room.

The other factor is whether to do an acoustically transparent screen. This type of screen allows you to place your speakers behind the screen to get that great effect of the sound appearing to come from the screen.

When you are looking at screens, you should also think about it as a lifetime purchase. While projector technology may change enough that every 5-10 years, you may want to upgrade, you will likely have your screen for a very long time. We liken it to buying a great pair of speakers you will probably own for decades.

If you have any questions about building a theater or choosing a projector, give us a call at 888.899.8776, chat with us, or stop by our award-winning showrooms. We live and breathe audio and home theater and love to help our customers find the right products for their situations. Once you have your projector in place, you can use our free calibration videos to calibrate your projector. We’ve also created a corresponding set for perfecting and calibrating your home theater audio.

If you are designing or upgrading your theater, be sure to check our buyers guides, videos of home theater installations, design guides, and our inspiration gallery at AudioAdvice.com. If you enjoyed this video be sure to like and subscribe and hit the notification button so you can get the latest content as we roll it out.

Thanks for watching and happy movie-watching!