Some of the newest models, like the XGIMI Halo or ViewSonic M2, can do a cool visual trick. An innovative auto-focus routine projects an imaging target that a sensor inside the projector analyzes to move the lens in and out until it sees sharp edges. It’s fun to watch and better than the sharpest-eyed technician.
If you want to learn more, please visit our website.
XGIMIThe XGIMI Halo pico projector
Because of limited space for ports, these pocket projectors generally have only an HDMI port, a USB A or C port, an audio jack, and sometimes a microSD card slot. Some of the newer models include Bluetooth for connecting to external speakers.
If you want to leave the laptop behind on your desk, the ViewSonic M2 will do the trick with a built-in Android computer and Wi-Fi. This allows it to wirelessly connect with a phone or project a website.
These are the power misers of the projector world, and as such, many can run on internal battery packs. Some, like the Halo, promise 3.5 hours of use away from an AC outlet. The gotcha is that its brightness can drop by 20% when on battery power. Still, it’s useful for projecting in a place without an AC outlet, like an outdoor company reception.
Any of these pocket projectors can go anywhere you go, providing new presentation possibilities. They may be small and light, but pocket projectors have huge ambitions in the business world.
Buying advice: These projectors can disappoint on resolution, so if you need sharp images, get one that projects HD resolution of 1920 x 1080.
Whether it’s pitching to a potential customer, showing off your company’s wares, or training fellow employees, the portable projector rules the business world by offering a bright, sharp image from a device that can be carried from room to room or city to city. With 1,500 lumens or more of brightness at their disposal, these devices blow away pocket projectors and mean that the lights can stay on and the shades up.
InFocusThe InFocus LightPro Advanced 3LCD Series IN1026 portable projector
That said, they are typically much bigger and heavier than their pocketable brethren, although the latest generation of portable projectors place a premium being slim and light. For example, at 1.7 inches (4 cm) tall and 4 lbs. (1.8 kg), the Epson PowerLite 1795F can slide into most notebook bags. At the other extreme, Optoma’s ZW350 pushes the definition of portability at four times the size and more than double the weight; it will likely need its own bag.
In this group, imaging technology is evenly split between LCD and DLP, with the latter having a big advantage on the road. While LCD projector designs often offer a superior color balance, they require an air filter to make sure no dust gets into the sensitive optical elements. DLPs generally have sealed optics, so there’s no need to worry about being slowed down in Cleveland with a clogged filter.
Portables at the low end typically stick with XGA (1024 x 768) or WXGA (1280 x 800) resolution, but HD (1920 x 1080) and UHD (3840 x 2160) resolution are becoming the norm for the midrange and up. In fact, some projectors are available in families that offer a variety of attributes at a range of prices, letting you choose what’s important. While the economical InFocus LightPro Advanced 3LCD Series IN1004 projector puts out 3,100 lumens in XGA resolution, its midrange cousin, the IN1026, offers WXGA resolution and 4,200 lumens for sharper, brighter images. The flagship IN1059 model combines 5,000 lumens of light with WUXGA (1920 x 1200) resolution.
Sharper still is the Anker Nebula Cosmos Max, which puts out 3840 x 2160 resolution with 1,500 lumens of light. Because it’s LED-based, you can forget about buying or installing a lamp ever again.
AnkerThe Anker Nebula Cosmos Max portable projector
Most projectors in this class offer horizontal and vertical keystone correction, and many include an optical zoom lens to adjust the image to exactly fill the screen. For instance, the Optoma ZW350’s lens can increase or decrease the image’s size by 30%. That said, many of these projectors have a maximum image size of 25 feet (7.6 meters), although they’ll more typically be used with screens no bigger than 10 feet (3 meters).
Expect a good assortment of ports, including HDMI (sometimes two), VGA, audio, USB A or C, and often an SD card slot. For those who want to travel ultralight, many in this class will let you lift images, video, and often PDFs from an SD card or USB flash drive without a laptop in sight. Some, like the Nebula Cosmos Max, add Wi-Fi, an Android computer, a web browser, and the ability to mirror what’s on a phone or tablet for ultimate flexibility.
The bottom line for nomads is that despite being heavier than pocket projectors, portables might actually lighten your load by letting you leave the laptop behind.
Buying advice: You’ll be carrying this projector around, so make every ounce count by looking for the best combination of brightness and portability.
Most projectors work best when they send their beam of light across the room. By contrast, short-throw and the newer ultra-short-throw projectors sit close to the screen. They’re great for small, oddly shaped rooms and those that lack a long, straight line to aim the projector’s output. There’s a big bonus for presenters: because the projector is behind them, they neither cast shadows on the material nor are blinded by the projector’s beam.
EpsonThe Epson BrightLink 1485Fi short-throw projector
Typically set up on the ceiling, wall, or floor within a foot or two of the screen, a short-throw projector like Epson’s HD (1920 x 1080) BrightLink 1485Fi can create a 9-foot (2.7-meter) image when set up 17 inches (43 cm) from the screen. Meanwhile, BenQ’s ultra-short-throw LW890UST can create the same image in WXGA (1280 x 800) resolution but from only 10 inches (25 cm) away from the screen.
Some of the newest members of the short throw bunch, like the LG ProBeam 4K, feature ultrasharp 3840 x 2160 resolution that makes every pixel count. In addition to lens shifting capabilities, its zoom lens makes easy work of exactly framing the image in a screen. Without this ability to resize the image with a zoom lens, the best you can do is delicately move the projector toward or away from the screen to reduce or enlarge the image’s size. It’s not pretty, but it works.
In fact, this genre can be tricky to set up, because the beam is aimed so steeply that if the projector is mounted slightly out of level, this imperfection is multiplied as it is projected. The best bet is to use a ceiling or wall mount that allows up-down, in-out, and side-to-side adjustments. Many models, such as BenQ’s LW890UST, come with all the hardware you’ll need to mount the projector. For those that don’t, a generic mount from Chief, Peerless, or others should work fine.
As is the case with other genres, solid state lighting is replacing traditional lamps in short-throw projectors, Although laser-based projectors like BenQ’s LW890UST command a price premium up front, lamp-based models like the inexpensive ViewSonic PS700W will need several lamps over their lifetime.
LGThe LG ProBeam 4K short-throw projector
Adding digital pens for participants to write on the screen can help with collaboration. The BrightLink 1485Fi comes with two pens, although it can accommodate up to eight at a time; extra pens cost $39 each. Think of them as the digital equivalent of a marker that can highlight a portion of an Excel sales spreadsheet, make lists, or just sketch ideas on the projection equivalent of a whiteboard. Epson’s GoBoard Collaborative Whiteboarding software lets you use different digital ink colors on the projected image, and the final product can be easily saved for posterity or a meeting report.
These projectors have plenty of room for ports. Look for two HDMI ports as well as VGA, Composite Video, or S-Video inputs. Several have video-out ports for sending the stream to another display.
With the ability to make a large image while being close to the screen, these short- and ultra-short-throw projectors do a lot with a little.
Buying advice: Get a model that includes interactive pens so your screen can become a creative workspace.
Often the most important business gets accomplished in executive conference rooms, so it’s essential to equip them with the appropriate audio-video gear to get your message across. Large and permanently set up, boardroom projectors are often the centerpiece of a lavish AV center that includes built-in microphones, speakers, and video equipment for teleconferences.
SonyThe Sony VPL-FHZ85 boardroom projector
Projectors in this class are brighter, have more advanced features and cost a great deal more than their portable siblings. To light up the conference room screen, they put out between 3,000 and 10,000 lumens. The class is split between solid-state illumination (mostly laser-based in this class) and traditional lamps. Laser projectors tend to cost more but will never need a new lamp, while the lamp-based systems will need a new lamp every couple of years.
Many in this class have interchangeable lenses that let the optics fit the room. This à la carte approach is seen with the seven different lenses Panasonic sells for its PT-MZ880 projector, ranging from an ultra-short-throw one for close-up projection to one for projecting across a long room. At up to several thousand dollars each, they can cost as much as a midrange projector.
In addition to being able to fine-tune the color balance, expect to get features like horizontal and vertical keystone correction as well as lens shifting so you’re not locked into setting the projector up exactly centered on the screen. Most boardroom projectors have motorized controls for zoom and focus that allow you to adjust the image via the remote control.
While you can still get a WXGA unit in this category, HD and 4K imaging are preferred, because a sharp picture is worth a thousand words (or more) when your career is on the line. The market is split between DLP, LCD, and Liquid Crystal on Silicon, a hybrid of the two. LCOS offers the brightness of a reflective technology with the excellent color balance of a liquid crystal device, but it typically costs more. The Canon Realis 4K600STZ LCOS laser projector, for instance, offers 6,000 lumens of brightness and native 4096 x 2400 resolution — and retails for about $50,000.
This projector class often includes a dedicated video processor that can improve so-so images and make numbers and text stand out from a white background. For instance, the Detail Clarity Processor on the Panasonic PT-MZ880 boosts the color output and sharpness by analyzing video a frame at a time and optimizing its color balance, contrast, and brightness.
A cool trick that can come in handy in a boardroom is the ability to present two video streams at once for before-and-after comparisons or a complex video call. The Sony VPL-FHZ85 lets you place the two streams side by side or with a smaller one inset on the main image.
While wired networking is de rigueur for boardroom projectors, Wi-Fi is sometimes offered as an option. Look for a wide variety of connections that range from HDMI and DisplayPort to DVI and VGA. Many can also tap into networked uncompressed HDBaseT video.
It all adds up to a big projector that can be hard to hide. There are three approaches here that are popular for conference rooms: Set up the projector behind the scenes as a rear projector that shines its beam through a translucent screen, put all the AV gear in a projection room, or use a motorized platform that lowers the projector into view when needed. When it’s time to project, just tap the remote control and the projector emerges, often as the screen descends at the other end of the room.
CanonThe Canon Realis 4K600STZ boardroom projector
Keep in mind that a large, high-end boardroom projector like the Canon Realis 4K600STZ consumes 665 watts of power — about what a microwave oven uses — compared to just 171 watts for Sharp/NEC’s NP-M380HL, an inexpensive projector aimed at classroom use. That said, the Realis 4K600STZ’s 6,000 lumens will blow away the NP-M380HL’s 3,800 lumens.
In this class, a two- or three-year warranty is expected, but Canon and Panasonic raise that to five years of coverage. Epson’s warranty lasts for three years in this class of projector, and the company’s ExpressCare includes overnight replacement service to minimize downtime.
Although prices start at around $3,000, they can quickly climb to $50,000 or more, particularly after you’ve gone lens shopping. Still, it’s just the start: Figure on spending as much or more on audio, cabling, behind-the-scenes video processing, and other accessories such as mounting hardware.
Buying advice: Because you may need to do two things at once, consider a boardroom projector that can project a split screen or picture-in-picture.
Got a large room with a large screen ready to be filled with video and images? To get a sharp, bright image that everyone can see, you’ll need a large-venue projector. By far the most expensive devices in the projection food chain, they are the flagships that deliver huge video streams and are the business world’s equivalent of theatrical projectors.
PanasonicThe Panasonic PT-RQ50KU large-venue projector
Sometimes as big a three-drawer file cabinet, these projectors are the brightest of the bunch, with the ability to put tens of thousands of lumens onto a screen. You’ll be hard-pressed to find new lamp-based large-venue projectors these days. Laser models are now the name of the game; their brightness and longevity make lamp-based models look like look like dinosaurs.
If you want to learn more, please visit our website bitaso.
Because of their extreme output, large-venue projectors can run hot, very hot. For instance, Panasonic’s PT-RQ50KU projector, which uses lasers to deliver 50,000 lumens in 4096 x 2160 resolution, has a heat output of 13,000 BTUs — as much as a room-sized space heater. The PT-RQ50KU, as well as more moderate large-venue projectors like the 20,000-lumen Sharp/NEC NC2003ML, use liquid cooling to keep the laser elements from burning out.
Many of these large-venue projectors have built-in edge-blending technology so that two or three projectors can be aimed at the same screen, combining their brightness or arranged side by side to create a tiled mosaic image of epic proportions. The Epson EB-PU2116 puts up to 16,000 lumens onto the screen, and its optional PixAlign camera helps create complex projector setups; it fits into a nook next to the projector’s lens.
EpsonThe Epson EB-PU2116 large-venue projector
When you have a room full of employees or potential customers, the final image counts for everything, and HD resolution is table stakes for large-venue projectors. Right now, 4K imaging is becoming increasingly popular; for example, the Barco UDX 4K26 projector uses lasers to pump out 26,000 lumens in super-sharp 3840 x 2400 resolution. There are nine lenses available that are sold separately.
This class of projectors has the best assortment of ports, including HDMI, DisplayPort, HDBaseT, SDI, and DVI. Alongside them are ports for wired networking, audio, USB, and even the RS-232 that allows remote operation.
Often, what you don’t get is speakers. The presumption is that these projectors will be connected to a room-wide sound system so everyone can hear. Also note that in most cases you’ll pay for lenses separately.
Regardless, price is no object here, with companies spending anywhere from $10,000 at the low end to upward of $250,000 on a high-performance projector for their auditorium. When your company’s image counts for everything, get the best and the brightest.
Buying advice: To fill a movie-theatre-sized screen and truly wow your audience, get the biggest and brightest projector you can afford, along with the sharpest lens.
This article was originally published in August 2014 and most recently updated in March 2023.
At the heart of every projector are two essentials: the imaging technology and the light source. The two interact in such a way that to fully understand your choices for the light source, you also have to know a little about the imaging technology it's paired with, and how imaging technologies work in general. So before we look at today's most common projection light sources—lamp, laser, and LED—and which might be best for your needs, let's start by talking about imaging.
All color displays, including projectors, are built around a core observation of how the human visual system perceives color. Namely, if you're working with light, you need only three primary colors—red, green, and blue—to produce every color the human eye can see. You only have to mix these three primary colors in the right proportions. Or at least that's the essence of it.
The concept of additive color allows that the three primary colors of red, green, and blue (for which the human eye has receptors) can be mixed to create all other visible colors, including white and the secondary colors magenta, cyan, and yellow.To be precise, the gamut of colors you can produce depends on the choice of red, green, and blue you start with, and if the starting points won't let you create every possible color, you can expand the gamut by adding more colors, like yellow, cyan, and magenta. We'll stay with the simplified version using just red, green, and blue for now, because that's what most displays do. But keep in mind that some add other colors, which we'll get to a little later.
If you launch a Windows or Mac program with a white background and use an 8x jeweler's loupe to look at your desktop or laptop screen up close, you won't see white. You'll see a repeating series of red, green, and blue rectangles—call them dots. Each set of red, green, and blue dots is a single pixel in the image. When you're too far away from the screen for your eye to resolve the individual dots, it integrates the three colors into the color you see, in this case white. Change the intensity of one or more of the primary colors and you'll see the combination as some other color. Turn off the blue dot, for example, and your eye will see the red and green combination as yellow. You might think of this as tricking your eye into seeing a color that isn't there. However, this is just a variation on how we see different colors in real world objects.
Digital video displays, such as this LCD screen, have pixels comprised of separately addressable red, green, and blue subpixels that allow mixing of the primaries to create any color, including white. Your eye blends them together when viewed from a distance. Black is the absence of light created by turning pixels off.This approach—of putting small dots of three primary colors on the screen at once and letting your eye integrate the colors over space—is also how projectors with three imaging chips work, a group that includes most models that use LCD or LCoS imaging chips, and a few seriously expensive models that use DLP chips. (At this writing, the least expensive, currently produced three-chip model in our database is $27,526.) There are also palmtop and pocket laser projectors that produce colors this way, aiming red, green, and blue laser beams directly at the screen to paint the image dot by dot, one dot at a time.
Another way to create color from three primaries is to show the red, green, and blue elements of the entire image separately, in sequence. If you rotate through the sequence repeatedly and quickly enough, your eye will integrate the colors over time. This is how single-chip projectors work, including the overwhelming majority of DLP models.
The potential problem with sequential color is that if the projector rotates through the color sequence too slowly in, say, a scene where James Bond walks across the room quickly while wearing a tuxedo and white shirt, the red, green, and blue elements of the shirt can fall on different parts of the retina. What you see then instead of white is a burst of red, green, and blue, otherwise known as a rainbow artifact. Some people see these more easily than others, and some projectors tend to show them more easily. Which brings us to light sources.
The rule of thumb for rainbow artifacts in single-chip projectors is that a larger percentage of laser projectors do a better job of avoiding them than projectors with LEDs, and a larger percentage with LEDs do a better job of avoiding them than projectors with lamps. This doesn't mean that all laser projectors necessarily show fewer rainbow artifacts than all lamp projectors, but it does mean that if you see these artifacts easily and consider them bothersome, it will be easier to find a single-chip laser projector you're comfortable watching than a single-chip lamp-based projector. That said, most major manufacturers of single-chip projectors have made gains in recent years in minimizing the potential for rainbows, though our usual caveat always applies: if you're sensitive to seeing these or worry you might be, it's best to purchase from a retailer who accepts returns or exchanges.
Putting aside the rainbow factor, there are also some advantages for projectors built around a single chip and sequential color. They're almost always smaller and lighter than equivalent projectors that use three chips, for example. That's one reason why most palmtop and pocket-size projectors use a single imaging chip even for LCD and LCoS models.
Single chip projectors also tend to be less expensive than equivalent three-chip projectors with the same rated brightness. But the issue of brightness is less straightforward than you might assume, because of the difference between white brightness and color brightness.
Briefly, white brightness—which is what projector lumen ratings refer to unless otherwise specified—measures brightness using a 100% white image. Color brightness measures the brightness for 100% red, 100% green, and 100% blue images separately, then adds the three measurements together.
Since three-chip projectors produce white by a combination of red, green, and blue dots, the maximum brightness for white is the same as the total of the maximum for red, green, and blue measured separately. This isn't always true for single-chip projectors, which sometimes add white or other colors to boost white brightness—a subject we'll come back to in a moment. The point here is that a less expensive single-chip projector that offers the same white brightness as a more expensive three-chip projector may have a lower color brightness.
This difference can give a single-chip design the advantage for business or education use, since it can match the brightness of a more expensive three-chip projector for images with a white background—like spreadsheets and word processing documents. But if the single-chip projector also has a lower color brightness—and we've measured color brightness as low as 20% of white brightness in some cases—it won't match the three-chip projector in brightness for full color images like photographs and movies. (You can read more about the difference between white brightness and color brightness in this article.)
Competitive projector manufacturers and projection enthusiasts are always debating the merits of color vs. white brightness and how the three-chip and single-chip approaches call for trade-offs in color accuracy or contrast. The image of colored paper on the left, projected from a calibrated 3-chip LCD projector with equal color and white brightness, appears brighter overall than the same image on the right from a calibrated single-chip DLP projector. However, if you focus on the white strip on the bottom half of the image just left of center, you can see that the single-chip has a more neutral white and higher apparent contrast. You can dive more into this subject in our article ANSI Lumens vs Color Light Output: the Debate Between LCD and DLP.All of which brings us back to how projectors create the colors you see on screen along with a quick look at light paths—a light path being the route light follows from source to lens in any given projector.
Light paths describe how a projector creates the red, green, blue (and potentially other colors) it needs; how it shines them through or bounces them off its imaging chips; and how it directs the light at the screen.
There are lots of variations in each step. For example, lamp-based projectors start with the white lamp light, and use filters to separate out the red, green, and blue components. Some LED projectors use red, green, and blue LEDs. Others start with blue and yellow LEDs, and use filters to separate out the red and green. Most laser projectors start with blue laser light, add yellow by aiming the laser at a phosphor that emits yellow when excited, and then use filters to break up the yellow into red and green components.
Lamp-based single-chip projectors typically pass their white light source through filters (most often presented as segments in a translucent color wheel) before bouncing the individual colors off the imaging chip sequentially. (Image courtesy of Maxell.) Though laser projector projectors can vary greatly in their light path depending on whether a single or multiple lasers are utilized, a typical single-laser projector has a blue laser whose light encounters a phosphor wheel to generate yellow that is then broken into red and green components. (Image courtesy of Maxell.)Most of the variations in light paths won't affect your choice of light source. However, one key variation based on the number of imaging chips can.
For projectors with three chips, once you have red, green, and blue, the path is simple: you aim the right color beam at the right chip, and direct all three colors through the lens simultaneously. For single-chip projectors, the path is trickier, since the projector has to send each color to the chip at the right time, namely: when it's ready to project dots in that color.
Depending on the type of light source, three-chip projectors use different methods to create separate red, green, and blue light streams that get sent to dedicated imaging chips for each primary color. (Image courtesy Maxell.)Single-chip LED projectors with red, green, and blue LEDs can simply turn each color LED on and off in sequence. Lamp-based models use a rotating color wheel that holds the color filters and is timed so each color filter is in the path of the light just when the chip needs that color. Most single-chip laser projectors do something similar, using a clear panel on both the phosphor wheel and color wheel to let blue laser light reach the chip and filters on the color wheel to convert the yellow light from the phosphor into red and green.
The color wheels that single chip projectors use makes it easy to add more colors besides red, green, and blue. The most common for lamp based projectors is a clear panel to add white—which is what lets them deliver higher white brightness than color brightness. Others add some combination of yellow, cyan, and magenta. For laser projectors, the most common addition is the yellow produced by the phosphor, simply by adding a clear panel to the color wheel.
The additional colors (and yes, white is a color in this context) can affect the colors you see. Adding white will make the image brighter, but it will also tend to hurt color accuracy, with color errors becoming more and more likely to be noticeable with bigger differences between white and color brightness. On the other hand, adding a yellow panel to a single-chip projector increases the odds that it can show a bright, vibrant yellow that matches the yellows in the best three-chip projectors. And adding yellow, cyan, and magenta panels increases the odds of delivering good color accuracy overall.
Color wheels come in many variations, some with only the red, green and blue primaries, and some adding various secondary colors to improve color accuracy or white to boost brightness.So a lamp-based, single-chip projector with a white panel added to its color wheel is usually desirable if you need a projector to watch in a conference room, classroom, or family room with ambient light. But it's usually a poor choice for a traditional home theater meant for viewing in a dark room. For home theater, color accuracy matters more, and the accuracy will almost certainly be better with just red, green, and blue panels in the wheel. Add some combination of yellow, cyan, and magenta and it may be better still.
And with all this as background, let's finally take a look at the light sources themselves.
There are only a few key specs that define the practical difference between lamps and solid-state light sources, meaning both LEDs and lasers: the range of brightness, the typical rated lifetime, and the percentage of initial brightness each loses early on. Lamps are outclassed by both solid-state technologies on two of these factors, and by lasers on all three. In addition, lamps have the shortcoming of containing mercury, which means you have to be concerned about disposing of them properly. All of which suggests lamps may be approaching the dead-man-walking phase of their evolution. But they're not there yet.
The brightness range for current lamp-based projectors in our ProjectorCentral Find a Projector database is roughly 1,000 to 43,000 lumens, although you can still find some rated at a few hundred lumens. The top brightness is a lot higher than for LED projectors, which range from 10 lumens to 4,500 lumens, but lower than for laser projectors, at 32 lumens to 75,000 lumens.
Lamp life varies with the projector model. For current projectors, it ranges from 2,000 to 10,000 hours in full power mode, and from 2,500 to 20,000 hours in Eco mode. But Eco mode ratings of 15,000 hours or more generally get their long life from features like slowly lowering power use—and brightness—when you leave the projector on for a while without the image changing. This can be useful in, say, a classroom where you might leave the projector running for some time even when you're not using it. But if you rarely or never do that, the lamp won't last that long.
Projection lamps, like the one shown here, will typically need periodic replacement over the projector's service life to restore the projector to its initial brightness. How many replacements depends on the hours of use and how bright the projector is set up to run. (Image courtesy of Epson.)In contrast, the vast majority of lasers and LEDs are rated at 20,000 hours or more at full power, and typically 30,000 hours in Eco mode. Some claim even longer lives. Note that end of life for LEDs and lasers isn't defined the same way as end of life for lamps, but both ratings are rough predictions of the light source's useful life.
Lamps also lose brightness more quickly than solid-state light sources, often by as much as 25% in the first 500 hours of use, then dropping more gradually to the 50% that defines end of life after that. Solid state projectors take longer to drop to any given percentage of initial brightness only partly thanks to their longer lives. They also have somewhat closer to a straight line of steady loss of brightness over their entire lives, rather than dropping halfway to end of life levels early on.
One clear strong point for lamps is low cost, which lets you buy a lamp-based projector for significantly less than the equivalent solid-state projector. But although a low initial price is obviously attractive, the key phrase is initial price. You should also consider the total cost of ownership.
Basically, the more often you expect to use the projector and the longer you expect to have it before replacing it, the more lamps you'll have to buy. What this translates to is that if you're planning to use a projector strictly for watching one or two movies a week, and you're the sort of videophile who wants to upgrade with every new innovation that comes to market—higher resolution, 3D, HDR, better implementation of HDR, and so on—the initial price may be your total cost. The same logic applies for a business, church, or school that expects to use the projector only a couple of hours a week.
At the other extreme, if you're buying a projector to use in a classroom or at home as a TV for five or more hours per day, and you don't expect to replace it before it becomes hopelessly obsolete, the cost of replacement lamps may be significant. In that case, you might want to calculate how many lamps you'll likely buy over the projector's lifetime and add the cost to the initial price. You may find that the lamp based projector winds up costing more in the long run. If so, a more expensive, solid-state projector can be the better buy—provided, of course, that it delivers the level of image quality you want.
LEDs are the light source for the overwhelming majority of small projectors, from sizes that will fit in a shirt pocket to palmtops and a little larger up to just under 2 pounds. Because the brightness for these projectors can be well below 100 lumens and is no more than 1,500 lumens, they're generally designed to get the most brightness possible from the LEDs, which often results in vibrant, but oversaturated, color. Few people, if any, would consider this a problem for business or classroom use. But if you want to watch movies or show photos, you'll have to make allowances with some of these models for colors that wander outside of a realistic range.
The few small projectors that don't use LEDs draw the image directly with lasers. This gives them an advantage specific to laser light. Just point the projector at any surface at any distance, and the image will be in focus. Unfortunately, another property of laser light is speckling artifacts. The speckles are less obvious in some models than others, but to minimize the speckling they defocus the image a bit. So with these models, you'll have to choose between a projector with the best possible focus or one without speckles.
Somewhat larger and brighter projectors, in the range of about 1,500 to 4,500 lumens, give you a choice in solid-state light sources of LEDs, Lasers, and LED-laser hybrids. All of the current hybrids at this writing are single-chip DLP projectors that are designed to emphasize brightness over good contrast and color accuracy, which means they're most appropriate for business and education. As with lamp-based projectors, any given LED projector can be designed for either kind of application, but even those that are designed for home theater use—and there are some that are specifically intended to replace flat-screen TVs—tend to have color accuracy that's best described as good enough.
Hybrid laser/LED light engines aren't common today, but Casio's lamp-free models feature a red LED in addition to a blue laser to improve color while retaining the high brightness and other benefits of solid-state laser projection. (Image courtesy of Casio.)Lasers in any brightness range can potentially deliver color accuracy and contrast as good as or better than lamp-based projectors—even though many laser projectors at this writing don't do so. And unlike lamp-based and LED models, even laser projectors designed to emphasize brightness over contrast and color accuracy can almost always handle movies well enough to be highly watchable.
Another advantage for laser projectors is that they tend to be far more useable at their highest brightness levels than lamp-based or LED models. All projectors' brightness ratings are based on settings that sacrifice color accuracy. For LED and lamp-based projectors, this typically adds a noticeable green bias. But most laser projectors deliver good enough color accuracy even in the brightest mode that most people would consider the colors more than acceptable for photorealistic images.
There are also some other advantages to laser light sources. Most laser projectors that pair the laser with a DLP chip, and some that use three LCDs, are virtually maintenance free, suitable for 24/7/365 operation, and can be mounted in any orientation over 360 degrees in all three axes. Having a maintenance-free projector is a welcome convenience for anyone. But the combination of features makes laser projectors the obvious preferred choice for certain kinds of applications, including digital signage, museum exhibits, and displays in locations from houses of worship, to retail stores, to corporate front lobbies and elsewhere.
For all these reasons, or until such time as LED catches up on laser's ability to deliver higher brightness, it seems lasers are bound to take over as the dominant—and eventually, perhaps, only—projector light source. For the moment, however, lasers, LEDs, and lamps each have their place. You just have to choose the right one.
Want more information on LED Projector Light Supplier? Feel free to contact us.