Digital Projector Advice

[Atmos (Colin)]

The photography club that I am apart of is looking at getting a new projector for inter club competitions. I thought I’d look to a wider community for some advice.

We’re looking for a projector that has good colour rendition that it’ll hold. It doesn’t need to be able to do greater resolution than 1920x1080 as they’re the maximum resolution that our digital images are judged upon.

Any suggestions?

[JA]

Hello Colin,

At the risk of generalising too much, where you will use it and the room illumination should be a big factor in your choice as you could go anything from a home theater projector (with typically better contrast and colour and lower maximum light intensity) to a venue/conference projector (which is typically much brighter at the expense of colour and contrast).

Is it used in a light controlled room/theatre? Would it be a permanent mount or portable? Projection distance and required image size? From my home theater days I can recommend Panasonic, JVC DLA projectors and some Epson units. I haven't checked recently, as I'm now happy with large TV, but I think you'll probably only easily find quality 4K units in the several thousand dollar range.

If your venue is home-theatre like in terms of light levels, then and older (1920x1080P) JVC DLA 350 /550 etc or possibly Panasonic would be an excellent 2nd hand choice (although check lamp usage life as for any projector). These days generic/copy replacement lamps are not too expensive $100-200, but in the past they were circa $800 OEM.

Even so maybe there are some new 1920x1080P projectors which may be of worth. See some possibilities below and go and see them in vivo at Klapp or The Big Picture People. In conclusion .... So a large screen tv won't cut it at say 65 to 75 inch?

Some projectors in Melbourne....
https://klappav.com.au/collections/projectors

Best
JA

[Shiraz (Ray)]

recommend an Epson. I bought an EB-U130 (current model is 140), which does more than full HD. It has enough light to work in almost any venue (3000lum), has an sRGB mode (which works well for astro images), costs under a grand and spare bulbs are cheap. Might also consider the 5600 home theatre version, which has a few nice features, but a bit less light output.

An EB-U130 also does a really decent job with video if you want to put on movie nights. It is an astonishingly good device for the money. Also bought the very effective Epson portable screen for about $100. Cheers Ray

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

+1 for the JVC, their D-ILA has been highly recommended for years. The Sony series are also excellent. Both use liquid crystal on silicon which gives a more film-like reproduction and excellent contrast ratios.

Of course, unless they are used in theatre-like conditions, any contrast ratio or colour reproduction metrics go out the window...

[Atmos (Colin)]

Thanks JA and Ray.
We meet in a hall and just turn most of the lights off when displaying images so we don’t need anything that bright. The only time we might have the lights on is if we’re giving a brief presentation if we’re having a club outing and we want to show what we’re going to be doing. We’re only in a small hall and no one is far from the screen which is a pull down.

Our current one we got five+ years ago and it was second hand then. We need something portable and only to project 3-5m.

We have discussed getting a large Kogan TV or something of that I’ll but we are very limited in storage space.