Projectors offer you the best visual option to deliver truly staggering and brilliant picture quality on your screen. On a cost per inch comparison, Projectors offer better cost value and image quality compared to HDTVs. Projectors come in various sizes, and types; and are usually projected on to a screen for best image quality, hence everything within a projector is focussed on creating the sharpest, most detailed picture possible. We list down the factors you need to check while shopping for your dream projector;
Light Source: Most projectors available in the market use a technically advanced, ultra high intensity lamp which provides the brightness to project pictures on a screen. Lamp based projectors offer the best quality images and brightness to your pictures. There are also projectors that use solid state technologies (like LED) for folks who prefer portability and decent picture quality but aren’t too demanding of the brightness levels.
Lamp Life: Projectors use a very high intensity discharge lamp (using mercury, or xenon in expensive models) and replacement lamps cost a fair bit of the cost of the projector itself. Manufacturers measure Lamp life in hours; most will claim 3000-4000 hours to begin with, with some of the newer models going up to 8000-10000 hours too, to make it simple 3000 hours translates to around 1200 movies watched or 3 years of TV/sport watching (assuming daily usage of 3 hours). LED lamps, on the other hand, can claim a usage life of about 20,000 hours.
Contrast Ratio: The contrast ratio can be defined as the ratio of the luminance of the brightest colour to that of the darkest, that the system can produce. Usually, manufacturers explain contrast ratios in ANSI contrast, by displaying a checkerboard of white and black squares to show the contrast between the dark and bright spots.
Contrast ratios are an important metric for Home theatre projectors since you’ll mainly be projecting video, and a higher contrast ratio ensures that there is more depth added to the images; the projector is able to show subtler colours and tolerate some level of extraneous light in the room.
(To be continued in Part 2)
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