Guide to the Classroom Projector Report for K-12 Education
This is Projector Reviews third year of producing our K-12 Education Projector Report - this time for the 2012-2013 school year. Many of the concepts we discuss remain unchanged from previous years. There are definite shifts in what types of projectors we looked at this year including more "pocket" projectors, more interactive projectors more ultra-short throw projectors, and more LED and or Laser light sources.
May 2012 - Art Feierman
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Topics Covered in this Projector Guide
- What's in this Report
- Reviews section - 16 projectors this year
- Awards
- 60+ additional classroom suitable projectors considered (but not reviewed)
- Defining your expectations:
- Are you a district level AV or IT manager, tech coordinator?
- A school level AV/IT manager or network administrator?
- A teacher?
- A driver of technology at your school?
- Understanding the physical classroom environment in selecting the proper projector equipment
Once again, many will find my writing style to be long on explanations. We expect this report will be read by a lot of folks at different technological levels, and with different responsibilities. I can almost hear some groans of "that's so obvious" from time to time, from those with lots of experience, we appreciate your understanding so we don't leave high and dry on the explanations, any less projector knowledgeable folks.
What's In This Report
Please check out the Special Features page. That's where we talk about the features that you may want to be considering, and others you definitely will. Hopefully we'll be able to provide a helpful insight or two.
The first, and largest part of this Classroom Projector Report considers the 16 projectors we've reviewed for K-12 schools. All but two have been reviewed since the beginning of this year. To the best of our knowledge, all are still available for schools to purchase for installation or accumulation this summer (2012).
This year most of the projectors were reviewed by Tony and Mike. Myself, I was finishing our Home Theater Projector Report, and only managed one review - a BenQ projector with a hybrid light source.
The Overview page is the first page of this report. It further touches on some of the points covered in this Guide to the Classoom Projector Report document. It also discusses awards, but, the two key aspects of the Overview page are the links to the reviews themselves (and to the specs pages) for each of the reviewed education projectors, and what should be a very helpful section with multiple paragraphs, a short summary - Highlights - of each of the fifteen reviewed projectors! Use those short summaries (and our sortable spreadsheet), to narrow down your choices a bit. Remember, they are summaries, and do not contain near as much information as the individual projector reviews.
You will find these individual projector summaries to vary a lot. Not enough space to touch on all the important points, so, typically, I spent a couple of paragraphs on each, discussing some features on some, other features (or benefits) on different projectors.
Basically when you finish that section, you hopefully will have a pretty good understanding about the abilities of each projector (although not a lot of fine detail), and have learned a lot of additional information that may affect your decision process while you are at it.
Winners of Our Projector Awards:
The awards are specific only to the Reviewed projectors. No awards are given out to the projectors on the section that considers dozens of projectors, most of which are related to the review projectors. Let me clarify. We might review one projector (let's say it's 2500 lumens, XGA, and lacks networking), and include it on the primary projector spreadsheet. On the larger spreadsheet, that projector's siblings are likely found.
The awards are:
Best In Classroom, Best In Classroom - Runner-up, and Special Interest awards.
Some projectors will also pick up our "standard" award: the Hot Product award.
This year, in the course of selecting the winners, and with an intent to maintain some decent perspective, pricing is based on estimated "street price" from authorized dealers. We say authorized, because once in a while you may see what seems to be a price ridiculously lower than everywhere else, from a non-authorized dealer. Remember - "let the buyer beware". If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. We use MAP or street prices because MSRPs can be all over the place. Two projectors can each be selling for $999, but one might have an MSRP of $1099, and the other $1999... That makes list (MSRP) prices rather useless.
Prices discussed here are the usual quantity one variety. For districts, state level purchasing, and the even larger Consortiums, many manufacturers have lower prices (often quantity based), and also quite often, longer warranties.
Most of these companies have special education programs offering such discounts and warranties. When the manufacturer does, they usually even have a fancy name for the Education program. A couple of examples: Epson Brighter Futures program, and Sony has a program called Extra Credit (nice play on words).
60+ Classroom Projectors Considered (but not reviewed)
Again, our goal is to provide you more than just a dozen or so reviews with some competitive analysis. We realize that it is most likely that you won't find exactly the best education projector for your classrooms, multi-purpose rooms, small auditoriums, and conference rooms, among the 15 reviews.
On the other hand, we believe that it is very likely that when you consider all the siblings to those reviewed projectors, then the likelyhood of finding the best match - the best projectors for your requirements, becomes pretty good. You might need widescreen, but we reviewed the XGA version, or you don't need networking, and the same manfacturer has an almost identical model to the one we reviewed, but, without networking... You get the idea. With many series having 3 to 8 related models who only differ by which combinations of features are included, expect that your final choice is likely to be found on the bigger spreadsheet with all the series projectors.
Typically, the series we show in the 2nd section of the report, is directly related to the review projector, but that isn't necessarily the case. We might have reviewed an interactive projector (let's say from Hitachi, the iPJ-AW250N) which doesn't have a full series, so we opted for the best education series of Hitachi projectors that aren't closely related to the iPJ-AW250N.
The chart should help you quickly determine which related projector in a series, has those features you need (or ones you don't want/need, so you can save money).
To use an excellent example from last year's report consier the Casio projectors. Let's say you love Casio's low, long term cost. small size, 2:1 zoom, etc., but you want all new projectors to be capable of presenting over USB. That kills off most of the models, but leaves 3 in the series
Thus, your "winner" isn't one that got a review, but typically a similar projector with a better feature set for your situation. Or, if buying multiple projectors you might even go with 2 or 3 different ones from the same series, depending on the specific needs of particular teachers, or departments. Science teachers may find that higher resolution projectors are more valuable to them, while History teachers are fine with basic resolution...
As was the case in 2011, this year our large chart is fully sortable, which should help you find what you are looking for, a lot faster. You can even sort on more than one field. As an example, you could search only for projectors that are 3D and interactive, or the same, plus widescreen, or show all projectors that have more than 2500 lumens, and networking...
Instructions around the spreadsheet will advise you how to do fancy sorts (easy)!
Defining Your Expectations:
Are you a district level AV or IT manager? Or perhaps you are school level AV/IT manager or network administrator? Maybe you are a teacher, and a driver of technology at your school? Or perhaps you are a Principal or other member of the administration ulitmately responsible for teaching effectiveness and budgets? Below some thoughts organized by these four types. This is the same document as in last year's report, with only minor changes.
School District Level AV or IT Manager
Ok, you've got a budget (hopefully) and some grant money for technology. You know how many projectors you'd like to add to the district this summer.
- Install all projectors - use portables, or a mix?
- Do they need to be networked?
- Is remote command and control important? Essential? Not all teachers are going to remember to turn off their projector Friday afternoon. Leaving it on for the weekend, but unused, can cost real money, when it's happening a lot. One typical projector running for 60 hours on the weekend will likely cost $5 in electricity. In addition, assuming the average 3000 hour lamp life, that 60 hours will cost you about $4 to $6 a lamp. 10 projectors on each weekend, out of say 200 (5%) - is $100 a weekend. Over a school year that's about $4000 wasted. Plus you will be replacing lamps (and when used) filters, more frequently, using up expensive manpower.
- Long term vs short term costs: Money's tight? Do you buy a lower cost projector so you can buy more units, even if spending, say 20% more on a projector with low long term cost, would reduce you costs over 5 or 10 years, by 50% or more? Tough call. I do hear from some admins who are so starved for maintenance monies that that have a number of projectors down, simply because they can't afford the replacement lamps. Those of you doing this a will understand that those costs can put a real dent into your operational budget. In my dealer days, I had a district we sold over 400 projectors to. They literally suffered that problem, of running out of money to replace lamps, and repair out of warranty units. Even stranger, they had grant money for new projectors, but nothing to get the ones they already own, back in action... (I guess that's like infrastructure in the US, build a new bridge, there's money, find the money to fix a damaged one, good luck.)
- Different levels of overall networking and presenting - Command and control and email notification networking is a boon to all you district and school IT/AV/network types, but other features are of far greater interest to the teachers - wireless presenting and wireless networking, having a projector that can display the screen of any computer in the room at the whim of the teacher.
- Different interfacing for "display": For example, Display-Link can mean no more VGA cables, and several other benefits presenting from your computer over USB (less expensive cabling for sure). Is that important, how much is that worth?
- Display messaging. Is there a need to allow projectors to display streams of information coming from the network? In an emergency, theoretically someone at the district can hit a button turning on every projector in the district, and then typing in a message that will be displayed. "Tornadoes - get under your desk" or whatever disaster is threatening.
School Level AV or IT Manager, Administrator, or Network Admin
Like the school district level people, you're probably neck deep in deciding what projectors and where to put them, installation, and of course, having them all installed. You, though, probably do a lot more interfacing with the teachers. Some of you are "caught" between a "rock" (District Managers) and a hard place "meeting teacher demands". Hmm, glad I'm not one of you.
Besides most of the same types of decisions as the district folks have to make, (I won't repeat all those bullet points from the paragraph above), you probably have to deal more with exceptions, options... I'm talking about things such as adding wireless presenting or a remote mouse. Integrating a projector with a SmartBoard, or any number of other possible issues that don't affect all of your projectors, but some. You are probably the people responsible for keeping the projectors running. Consider cost factors, consider the room requirements.
Definitely consider labor - changing lamps, cleaning filters, etc. Oh, I have great confidence that you know your job, you should! After all, probably most of the teachers, and all the district IT/AV and budget people are all telling you how to do it. Good luck!
Teachers - Both "typical" teachers teachers who are key recommenders of technology
While today a large percentage of projectors going into schools are purchased in quanties, no one for a second, thinks that individual teachers aren't also involved, and in many cases, the only projectors in schools are there because of the teachers - buying one when the money is available. If your network and IT/AV people aren't dictating terms to you, then it's pretty much your call. Your first big question is will the projector be mounted? I suspect that a far higher percentage of individual projector purchases at schools are portable projectors in that they are not mounted, but table top, and locked away when not in use. In many cases, the projectors are shared. Check out your room lighting controls! Make sure, if you want to mount, that the projector can be mounted where it needs to be.
Do you need remote mousing? What about presenting from flash drives - computer free - (only viable if you are not ceiling mounting the projector). If the projector is to be ceiling mounted, then you need to run a USB down to your work area. Close captioning - if you need it, most new projectors have it, but, make sure, there were still three of our fifeen reviewed projector that don't have it.
If you take your projector based teaching seriously, and plan to use the projector a lot, you'll probably need to pay attention to long term costs. If you will have the projector running say 25 hours a week, 40 weeks a year - on the projector with the worst lamp life, that's a couple/three hundred dollars every other year. On the best projector, you can run 25 hours a week/40, for 20 years... without a lamp change. Most fall in the middle. I've met teachers who have bought replacement lamps out of their own money for a projector owned by the school, simply because the teacher takes great advantage of the technology for teaching, and the school has run out of money for replacement lamps...
There's so much more that a teacher looking for one projector can consider, but before I forget, big choices include widescreen (wxga) or 4:3 (xga, and there are still some svga projectors out there for $400 or less).
One last thought - if you are a Mac user, with most of these brands, if you want your laptop screen live while teaching/presenting, the resolutions available may be very different from one projector to another. In most cases with XGA projectors - feeding from my MacBook Pro, I ended up with XGA (1024x768) on the screen with XGA projectors, but with two of them, only 800x600. If you have a widescreen MacBook Pro, it really can upset the resolution decisions of a few of these projectors, including widescreen projectors. Sorry, we weren't able to be thorough about working with Macs, but all fifteen will work with a Mac, just the resulting resolution may surprise you with a few. No worries there are usually workarounds, or you can turn off the computer's display which should give you more flexiblity in setting resolutions.
If you are a recommender of technology, you may be a teacher, but your issues are more like the IT/AV folks because, you've got people asking your advice, and they all want something different, in features and benefits.
Principal, Superintendent - Which projectors for you?
The buck stops here, or so they say. I don't envy you in these days of shrinking budgets. In most cases, you'll leave a lot of the technology to the experts, but, as you will read, throughout this report a whole lot about cost of operation.
And don't forget things such as some projectors attached to your network, can be powered up remotely by your IT guy, and you can send messages across to display on all projectors in your school (or district).
From my previous experience working with several large districts, a thought: A lot of districts - and schools - using Federal grant money, tend to buy all the same projector, for all the schools, or in one school, for all the classrooms. To me, that's a red flag. It's probably smart to buy all your projectors from the same manufacturer - it drastically simplfies support, but even if we're talking a school looking for 12 projectors, there's good reason to have two or three different models to reach different needs. Consider this example: 8 classrooms basic projectors with networking, etc, XGA resolution and 2 projectors for computer rooms that can present from any computer in the classroom. You might also have two classrooms where having a widescreen projector works better, because most of the best content/coursework for that class subject is provided for widescreen display (maybe Chemistry, or Drama, or Intro to Algebra) - could be any type of class. Or you might want widescreen, and interactivity for some classes. Widescreen projectors tend to be better for interactive environments, as their screen height is lower. Tall screens may be tough to reach with that interactive pen, especially if students are being invited up to the front to use it.
And lets' go back to those two computer classrooms. Those are probably likely to use a lot of projector hours, if used at all. For that reason, you might want to pay more attention to lamp life and long term costs when deciding on those two projectors, than the others.
Hey, no one said it's easy. It's not, if you want to do it right.
So, choose wisely!
Understanding Your Room Environment
Projector and Room Brightness
First and foremost: Ambient light is the enemy of all projector systems. Not a big problem these days, unless you are unfortunate enough to have a projector positioned so the sunlight hits your screen. That is allways a bad setup! In that case, there are few projectors that can deal with direct sunlight around - let alone on - the screen, and none of them are even relatively inexpensive.
The good news is that as long as the sunlight hits elsewhere in the room, all of these projectors are basically bright enough to do the job, with the exception of the Pocket Projectors included in this report. Excluding those, the brightest claim to be more than 2x as bright as the least bright, but that's not truly a huge difference. (If you have two light switches - each controlling half of your room's fluorescents, then turning off one drops brightness by half, right?) The room goes from bright to well lit, not to dim or dark. That's the power of a 2x increase or decrease in brightness. Sunlight is probably 5 to 20 times brighter when hitting the screen, than the fluorescents when on.
Regardless of how you look at it, brighter is better, just don't put a lot of faith in expecting to go from a 2500 to 3200 lumen projector, in terms of making a huge jump in brightness. Important also to consider:
One big advantage of spending more for a brighter projector, is that you can run it in eco-mode, saving money, by increasing lamp life. Compare that to running a similar projector, say, selling for $300 less, with 2/3 to 3/4ths the overall brightness, one that is as bright at full power, as the brighter projector in eco-mode. With lamps costing $200 to $400 a piece, and the standard life being 2000 hours (full) / 3000 hours (eco) (though most in this report last much longer), you can see how in the long run - several years - you might have to buy a 2nd and then a third lamp, possibly before you even need a second lamp for the brighter projector in eco-mode. That is, spending more up front to save far more down the road, is an option. It may be a very smart option if finding money down the road, for maintaining your projector fleet, is expected to be difficult.
This has been a problem, since schools and districts often find technology grants for buying the hardware, but money for routine maintenance is scarce.
This year schools are even more concerned with cost of operation and lifetime costs than ever before as money for schools is getting tighter and tighter.
More and more schools have skylights in classrooms to increase light, reducing the electrical bill. Knowing where that sunlight might hit at different times of the class day, might be a good thing to know.
This image, and the one below, provided curtesy of Epson America.
Presenting without getting blinded. Ceiling mounting won't prevent you from being dazzled by the projector, some of the time when facing the class. The real trick is to go with the new crop of ultra-short throw projectors (or some very short throw models). Since most mount between a foot and 3 feet from the screen, and slightly above the screen (on a telescoping wall mount), they almost completely eliminate the problem, and those that mount extremely close, like the Brightlink 485wi, and Hitachi iPJ-AW250N, solve the problem about as completely as possible while still using front projection.
But, I didn't want to just discuss brightness issues here.
Networking: Does your room support networking. Is your school or district able to take advantage of that - for emergency broadcasts or simple announcements. More and more of these projectors are Crestron Roomview compatible. That implies features like email notifications (i.e. of the projector needs servicing), remote broadcast for emergencies, monitoring, and control of the projector.
Who will install the projectors?
Internal team, dealer/integrators? I am not recommending one over the other, but some choices in projectors will raise the costs. For example a wall mounted above the screen ultra-short throw projector needs less cabling, less installation time than a traditional ceiling mount. When you are contracting with a dealer, the difference can be a lot. If you have school tech teams doing the work, then the hours change a bit, but the costs are less likely to blow out your budget.
Who will maintain them?
Virtually every LCD projector on the market has at least one filter. A few don't need filters changed for a couple thousand hours or more, some only when the lamp gets changed, but most LCD projectors will, at some point require a filter change.
DLP projectors mostly lack filters, and when they do, they will normally not need changing in less than a thousand hours or two, of use. That brings us to one aspect of cost of ownership, maintaining the projectors.
If you have a lot of projectors, filter cleaning can become a tiresome, labor intensive chore, if those filters need frequent, rather than infequent changing. For a projector or three, that's not a big deal. If you are managing 500 projectors spread across 20 schools and you have projectors that want lamps cleaned every 250 or even 500 hours, you now have a logistical and cost headache. If you have to touch the filter every 1000 or couple thousand hours, then it shouldn't be near as significant of a factor. In this report, one of the Epson projectors claims the filter gets changed every 5000 hours, which means just change it out when a new lamp is needed. That's ideal. All of the projectors in this report can be ceiling (or for the ultra short throws, wall mounted), except for the pocket projectors. A fewl of these projectors must be detached from the ceiling or wall mount, to get to the lamp door. Trust me, that's a pain, it makes lamp replacement take many times longer.
A fast lamp replacement, if a projector is already cool, should take 5-10 minutes and that is including: Moving chairs or desks to gain access, opening a ladder, climbing it. Using a screwdriver to remove two to six screws, removing the door (it might be hinged), removing the lamp, sliding in the new one, replacing the door and screws. Then: Clean the lens and check the focus and image on the screen (it's easy enough to accidently change the focus or slightly change the angle of the projector...)
If you have to unmount the projector from the ceiling or wall mount, the 2-5 minutes needed above, can stretch to 20 minutes 30 minutes or a lot longer. And I can tell you, it's a real pain in the you know what!
The Interactive Projector - Big Time
Ahh something new, sort of. As a projector dealer, my old company had sold SmartBoards since the mid '90s. 
Smart Boards, especially in conjunction with a projector, makes a rather powerful tool. If you aren't familiar with SmartBoards and competing products, check'm out. No time to get deep into it here.
You just want to know this: Most of the core features of a combination of SmartBoard and projector, plus many additional ones, are appearing from projector manufacturers, moving into Smart's "space". Last year, the Epson Brightlink 450wi was the first one we saw. This year, we are reviewing the updated, 455wi. Last year that was the only interactive projector shipping at the time of our report, but this year we have four and there are several others on the market.
May I recommend you read Tony's review about the Epson Brightlink, Then, you might want to check out the Smart site as well so you can get a handle on the incredible wealth of abilities possible with a projector + SmartBoard, or an Interactive Projector. In the case of the Epson, no need for any type of "smartboard", just the projector and a standard whiteboard. Impressive stuff. I think the most amazing thing though is how these new interactive projectors dramatically reduce the cost compared to projector + SmartBoard. You don't get all the features, but you may be able to buy 3 inteactives for the price of 2, or buy 5 for the price of 3 (projector + smart board). That's huge!
An update on our Goals from last year's Education Projector Rport
Last year we projected these goals for the 2011-2012 Report:
We all hope you find this report extremely helpful, and we'll try to do five additional things for next years' report: 1) have it completed earlier, specifically have it completely published by 4/30 of next year, so you have more time to shop using our report, before you have to send your requests to purchasing. 2) provide what info we can about each manufacturers' special education programs and discounts. 3) have more projectors reviewed for the report. 4) Take a serious look at 3D, which should be ready for "prime-time" by then. And finally: 5) Add a FAQ section.
For all of you network adminstrators, we've done the best we can, in trying to sort out networking for you, but only Tony has any real networking experience. It reality, you guys know a lot more about networking, and presenting over networks, and email notifications, and command and control, than my team does. We're not embarrassed about that, but, hey, if you see we got something wrong, email me, and we'll fix it.
3D: This year, finding suitable 3D ready projectors at almost any price is easy, just look to almost any new DLP projector.. Still, going into the 2012-2013 school year, 3D is still in its infantcy as far as implementation goes in the schools.
Just remember (I'll keep reminding): Most likely any projectors purchased this year, will still be in use in 6-10 years. That means you need to consider if you will be doing 3D "down the road" - even 3-4-5 years out. If you expect to need 3D down the road, remember, you probably won't have budget to replace this year's purchased projector that soon. Of course even if 3D becomes extremely popular in the schools, that doesn't mean you'll need 3D abilities in every classroom, or even most. Lots to think about, when determining the mix of projectors for a school, a school district or a state purchase.
Last thought, word is, on the street, that TI (Texas Instruments) will have a chip set ready for next year's projectors that will make it simple for a manufacturer of DLP projectors (DLP is a TI product), to have 3D abilities in most or all of their models, and likely at a much smaller additional price for 3D, than is the case today.
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