Every time I have people over my house, and they come down
my basement, I get a bunch of questions about my projection set up for my home
theater. So today, I want to talk about projectors and why you might want to
consider one over a TV.
Now, it is important to consider that projectors and TVs serve
two different purposes, and there are pros and cons to both. Now, for some
reason, people tend to think that projectors are really expensive, but in most
cases, a good budget projector is actually going to cost you less than a large
TV.
Right now, the projector that I use in my basement cost me
just under 600 bucks when I bought it two years ago.
Now, as you know, a
projector is going to require you to have some type of a screen or a surface
for you to display an image. Now, there's a bunch of different ways that you
can go about doing this, but what I ended up doing was building my own screen.I
just took a bunch of wood, made a frame out of it. I bought some Carl's
FlexiWhite Screen Material. I stretched it over the frame and stapled it, and
then I put felt tape around it. It was really simple to do. I'll actually link
some of those materials that I bought at the end of this article so you can check
them out if you're interested.
I've got a 140” 16 x 9 screen that cost me just over a
hundred bucks to build. Now, there are a few different screen types. If you're
not handy, you can actually buy a fixed frame screen if you want to. You've got
pull-down screens, and then you can actually just paint the wall. If you've got
a blank wall in our basement, drywall, you can paint that with some good paint,
and you'll be just fine with that as well.
Now, of those options, a fixed frame is pretty much going to
give you the best picture quality for the most part, but if you don't have the
money, painting a wall does work really well. Now, considering that a projector
is using light from a bulb, it's not going to be as bright as a TV, so they
typically work better in a basement or a dedicated theater room, somewhere
where you can easily control the light.
Now, if you really do want to put it into a bright room,
there are ways that you can combat that. You can make the screen a little bit
smaller just because the bigger the screen is the darker the picture's going to
be, so that's going to help you fight light when you make the picture a little
smaller. You can also get different types of screen material that'll actually
reject the light, or you can get different types of paints if you're putting it
on a wall that'll help it with that as well.
Now, another thing that you need to consider is throw
distance, and throw is basically how far the projector is from the wall or from
the screen. The average projector needs to be several feet away from your
screen in order to project a large image. Let's say, for instance, you want to
do an 120” screen most projectors are probably going to need to be about 13 or
14 feet away in order to get that size picture.
That is something you may want to consider if you're
thinking about putting a projector in a small space. You definitely want to
consider throw. Now, if you really don't have the space, you can buy what's
called the short throw projector, which is what I actually bought, and
that allows you to put the projector way closer to the screen. Some of them
actually can be sit right in front of the screen and some of them you can sit a
few feet away. In my case, I have 140” screen, and it's sitting about 9.5 feet
away.
So a short throw projector is going to allow you to project
a really large image from a shorter distance. Now, short throw projectors do
cost a little bit more, and the image quality does suffer a little bit
comparing it to a non-short throw projector, but it's not really enough for
most people to notice.
Another thing I want to mention about projectors is lamp or
bulb life. I've always heard that the lamps burn out and they're really
expensive to replace, which means it's not worth getting a projector. That's
not really true anymore in the case of budget projectors.
First, we need to consider that you're going to get an
average of about 4,000 hours out of the lamp, which is a considerable amount of
time for the projector to be on. Now, if you do go beyond that, and the lamp
does burn out, it's only going to cost you around a hundred dollars to replace
the bulb on a budget projector so that's not really bad at all.
Now, TVs are great for just about any space, but when you
want something really large and you're comparing them to a projector it can get
really really expensive. A really cheap 70” TV is going to cost you maybe
around a thousand bucks. A good 70” TV is going to cost you 1,800. Once you
start to get into 80 or 85” TVs you're well on to four or five $6,000 or more.
Now, to be fair, TVs do have a lot of benefits over
projectors. The first thing is that they're really really bright, so you really
don't have to worry about putting it in a bright room because it's bright
enough that it's going to overpower whatever light you have in the room.
Another thing about TVs is that most of them are smart now.
They have smart features built in to them. That's not something you're normally
going to find in a projector. In order to get smart features on a projector,
you'd have to hook up something like a Roku, Chromecast, or a Fire TV or
something like that.
Another thing to consider is 4K and HDR. Now, there are 4K
HDR projectors out there, but if you're the average person and you're really
really interested in 4K HDR you might want to consider a TV over a projector,
unless you're willing to pay at least $10,000.
Now, after hearing that, I'm sure you're probably thinking, “Why
would anybody buy a projector over a TV after hearing all the benefits of a TV?”
Well, there are two reasons you might want to consider a
projector. Reason number one is “wow” factor. There's nothing like walking into
a room and seeing a huge screen with a nice picture on it. Now, let's consider
that the average movie theater is going to use a 2K projector, which is very
close to just a 1080p projector.
Now, depending on where you're sitting in that movie theater, you could actually have a better experience at home sitting in front of a 120” screen 10 feet away. If you're sitting way back in a movie theater, then yes, that's going to be a really sharp picture to you because you're not right up, and you can't really see the pixels, but if you're sitting on the first few rows, you're definitely going to notice a drastic difference in picture quality.
This means you can take a 1080p projector, put it in your basement, and you can actually get sharper images than you get at the movies.Long story short, most people would be more impressed walking into a home theater with a huge screen in it and with a thousand dollar projector than they would with an 80” $8,000 TV.
Reason number two is that it's more immersive. Trust
me when I tell you that having a huge 1080p screen versus having a smaller 4K
screen can definitely be a much better experience. I mean, how would you feel
if you walked into a movie theater, and they had an 80” screen on the wall
instead of a 50' screen? That's the major difference between a projector and a
TV.
Now, that's not to say that you can't get a 4K projector. I
mean, if you want to spend the money, you definitely can get one, but the
technology is moving so fast that I personally don't think it's worth getting
right now.
We've just gone over a bunch of pros and cons for TVs and
projectors. Now, I'm not trying to tell you that projectors are better TVs. I'm
just laying out the facts. I actually just bought a 65” HDR TV, and I love it.
If I'm watching certain things like sports or if I wanted to just watch a quick
movie upstairs, I have no problem doing that in my living room ,
Now that we've talked all about video, we're definitely not
going to stop there. Another thing I want you to consider is that the visual
experience is only half the battle. The other half is going to be audio. Once
you get that projector up, the very first thing you're going to want to do is
upgrade your audio if you don't have a decent audio set up because, trust me,
once you set up that big screen, if you have small sound coming out of it, it's
going to ruin your experience.
Now, I have a 9.2 channel home theater set up in
my basement. You don't necessarily have to do a 9.2 setup, but definitely try
to do at least a 5.1 if you can. If you want to get a sound bar, that's fine.
Just make sure that you have decent audio because when you have a larger
screen, if you have smaller sound, it's going to make the screen feel smaller
than it actually is.
So if were interested in projectors, I'm really hoping this
article helped you, but I did want to clear up some questions and some common
misconceptions about projectors and just compare them to TVs to help you out if
you're thinking about it.
* Recommended Projectors:
Benq E310 DLP Smart Office Projector ⟾ http://bit.ly/BenqE310
wowoto S6A Ultra Short Throw ⟾ http://bit.ly/wowoto
* Screen Materials:
100 inch Projector Screen - White ⟾ http://bit.ly/Projector-Screen
*Budget Speaker :
JBL PS3300 ⟾ http://bit.ly/JBL-PS3300
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