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Monday, January 31, 2005
Projectors vs Plasma, LCDs, Rear Projection In moving toward an HD home theater system, probably the largest decision you'll make is the display. Do you get a plasma, an LCD, a rear projection, or a regular projector? For value, there is no comparison to a projection system on a decent screen.
A projector has three giant advantages over any of the other options: price, space, and size. In my own system, I use an InFocus X1 projected onto an 84" wide screen, giving me an effective 100" screen for about $1000. It is mounted in a closet behind the seats, and takes no floor space at all. Take any decent SVGA or above projector, an all-in-one DVD theater system, and a screen from Office Depot or wherever, and you will have an incredible home theater for less than the cheapest rear-projection displays. You could get it all for under $1000 if you look a little. A couple of considerations people normally need to make are aspect ratio, bulb life, and ambient light. My X1 is not the brightest projector, so I do use some window coverings to get the full experience, but only because it looks so good I want to max out on the pleasure. With a $4000 plasma that's 25% of the size, I'm just watching TV, so I don't really think about improving it a lot. On aspect ratio, at least for the foreseeable future I'll be recommending getting a 4:3 projector. Width is almost always the limiting factor, so 4:3 doesn't limit widescreen, whereas a 16:9 would limit fullscreen size unless you do that hideous stretch-to-fill. The $900 X2 has a bulb life of about 3000 hours, which would be about 8 hours a day for a solid year, before you had to buy another few hundred dollar bulb. I know it scares some people off, but it's not even a question for me, or for most people that see a projector in action. It's not expensive, and it's not difficult to replace.  When using data projectors, the connectors are not always optimal for home theater. For example, the HD outputs on your cable box might be component and the input on the projector is VGA. This cable is just what you need. If you have multiple sources, it's usually easiest to use component to VGA and then VGA to the projector, because VGA switching or KVM boxes are much cheaper than component ones.
We'll go more into depth on some of these things as we go on, but please make sure you think things through before you spend thousands on your display without needing to. There aren't a lot of 100" screens available in the $1000 range anyway.
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Gadgetize: Projectors vs Plasma, LCDs, Rear Projection