Reviews of Video Projectors

Video Projector Reviews

About Video Projectors

So “video projectors” cover a wide range of products, so to narrow down your search, you may specifically be looking for home theater projectors, business projectors, classroom projectors, pico projectors, or even 3D projectors.

All right, so most of us are on a tight budget. So ask yourself some important questions before buying a video projector….

• Are you looking to setup a home entertainment system, to give presentations in a conference room or auditorium, or use video projection in your lesson plan?
• What kind of environment are you working in? How many people will be viewing?
• How much ambient light, or light pollution, are you dealing with? ANSI lumens output is a measure of projector brightness, and is also directly related to how expensive your video projector will be. Projector resolution and ANSI lumens are the largest factors in determining price.
• What, if any, special technical features do you require?
• Are you looking for the latest HD video projector technology, or are you just looking for a tool to give a professional presentation?

With all the variety the projector market has to offer today, there is definitely the perfect video projector out there to fit your presentation or entertainment needs.

Let’s explore the technical side of video projectors….

What makes one video projector most significantly different from another is often the resolution. Over the past couple decades, we have seen the evolution of resolution in video projectors. Originally, projectors could stream video only (NTSC) or only data, not both. However, as time progressed, most ended up with both video and data capabilities, with the data resolution being VGA (640×480).

With subsequent projector generations, we started seeing higher resolution on the data side such as SVGA (800×600) and XGA (1024×768). Perhaps most importantly, in the early/mid-2000s, we also started seeing a slow and steady shfit in computers from 4:3 aspect ratio to widescreen! We mention this, of course, because this shift brought us things like WSVGA, WVGA, and now the extremeley popular WXGA.

Over the last few years, thanks to the HDTV standard, television, computers and all forms of other video displays are getting closer to each other in terms of resolution.

WXGA is very important because it comes in several similar resolutions which are all very similar to the first high-definition resolution, 720p. 720p is 1280×720, which is just a little below WXGA resolution, allowing the 720p projector to produce high-definition images without compression. Thus, we’ve got high-def viewing!

We have also seen an impressive evolution in the technical capabilities of video projectors. Until the last several years, video primarily came across to projectors from the ancient, traditional NTSC, which, as mentioned previously, was your old standard US television broadcast quality.

However, as resolution got higher and higher, video projectors involved in terms of inputs!

The highest quality video for years (until recently) was component video, with typically 3 RCA jacks colored red, green and blue. But today, all home theater projectors, as well as most regular projectors, now offer digital inputs for video – either the older commercial DVI or the far more popular and smaller connector, HDMI.