2011 Home Theater Projector Comparison- Physical Tour-6

As you can see from the chart above, if you have a projector like the Mitsubishi HC3800 (has 16.5 inches offset, the most of these projectors. For it, an 8 foot ceiling, and a 110 inch diagonal screen, the bottom of your screen surface is about 20 inches from the floor. That's certainly about as low as anyone would want. With the same 8 foot ceiling, and a 128" screen (like mine), you'd have to dig a hole, as the bottom of the screen would be below the floor level!

If your setup is going to be tight, you may want to start by figuring out how close to the ceiling, you can mount the projector. Then add the distance to the center of the lens which will vary depending on how far (vertically) from the top of the projector to the center of the lens.

Distance from ceiling to top (inverted) of the projector + Distance from top of projector to center of lens = Total distance from ceiling to lens center.

Bottom line: This year's projectors, as a group, are far better than last year's when it comes to vertical placement flexibility. For openers, not one over $2000 projector in our report lacks adjustable lens shift. Last year we had 3 higher priced projectors without lens shift. In fact, despite the addition of three new entry level $999 projectors without lens shift, this year's crop of projectors finds that lens shift is finding its way on to more and more DLP projectors (it's already standard on all LCD and LCoS projectors we reviewed.