FAQs: Your reviews don't focus on specs - and notably, don't measure the projector's brightness or contrast. Why?
Question: Your reviews don't focus on specs - and notably, don't measure the projector's brightness or contrast. Why?
Answer: The projector reviews on this site are a mix of objective and subjective information. I don't like to quibble about a few lumens here or there, or, in the case of contrast (on home theater projectors in particular), the products often use advanced, frame by frame adjustment to the image, which becomes essentially impossible to measure accurately, and, therefore, come up with a spec that gives a true picture of performance.
Instead, our site focuses, on the practical. "yes, this projector is bright enough to fill a 110" high contast screen, in a controlled environment with minimal or no ambient light". For each (home theater) projector, many hours of viewing on movies and hi-def sources go into the opinions posted in terms of screen recommendations, whether the projector will do a good job on a particular sized screen, etc.
I also highly value other aspects of a product, including the warranty, support issues (when I am aware of them), which to most potential buyers should be important. Certainly car buyers care about whether the cars they are looking at are particularly reliable or not. I believe that is equally important to projector buyers, who are spending anywhere from $1000 to $10,000+.
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Image quality, be it sharpness, color accuracy, black levels, shadow detail, how a projector handles non-native resolution sources, are all important, and to most users, far more important than one projector being 50 lumens brighter than another, in actual testing.
Other non-image quality issues can be equally important - the range of the zoom lens (especially on home theater projectors), whether the projector has lens shift, and how much shift it offers, the functionality of the remote control, the number and types of inputs, ease of use of menus, and noise levels.
As a result, the review looks heavily into all of these aspects and tries to provide projector information, advice, and opinions that allow readers to figure out which projector will work best for their needs and environment.
The good news is that today's projectors are pretty refined products, without serious shortcomings. Few are bad choices, but there are always those one or two projectors out of the entire product field that will work best for a person's specific needs. We try to provide enough insight so that you can choose the projector that will work best for you.