If you haven’t fully understood the projectors yet and are not sure what works for you, then this article is for you! At least, I wrote it with the intention of putting everything into shelves and making it as simple as possible. Also, I suggest to consider projectors as a kind of modular constructor – we take an “ordinary projector” featured in https://bestrobotsguide.com/ as a starting point and look in which direction you should go according to your tasks. Once you’ve decided on the type of projector and the functionality you need (and don’t need), you’ll narrow your choice down to a few models.

This article is intended to be the most general and, in addition to the projector types, it will discuss the most important features that are inherent to most projectors. However, you will find some links to more specialized articles devoted to a detailed review of a projector type or feature.

The most standard projector is also called a budget “office projector” or “projector for business and education”. It costs from $700 (maybe less) and has a brightness of about 3000 lumens, which allows it to give a legible image in well-lit rooms of schools, offices, classrooms of universities and so on. There are two things in the budget.

First, the budget projector does not have any exaggerations in terms of image quality – it should be sufficient, but not more.

Secondly, additional functionality of such projectors is minimal. It is, first of all, a minimum set of tools that provide freedom in choosing the place of installation of the projector – the distance from the screen and the height of installation.

On the other hand, recently the requirements to projectors for schools and offices have become “outdated”. Among these requirements is a large number of not very expensive but useful features, such as the control of presentation from the projector console or the presence of digital correction of image geometry, which allows, even if at the expense of sharpness, but still, to place the projector above / below or left / right of the optimal position.

And don’t forget that at the high brightness required by the projector to fight external light to maintain high legibility and image quality, the projector should remain within 3kg and the body should be compact and easy to transport.

Here are two separate articles on projectors for schools and multimedia projectors for presentations.

So, we’ve touched upon an ordinary projector – most models on the market belong to this type. All other types of projectors have come from it and if you don’t have enough basic capabilities, you will definitely go in one direction:

• You need more brightness for large rooms and screens – “installation projectors”.
• Need more functionality – “short-focus projectors”, “network projectors”, higher resolution, etc.
• Need better image quality in the dark – “projectors for home theater”.
• You need the minimum dimensions at low brightness – “pocket projectors”, “peak projectors”.

Home projectors

I would like to deal with this category right away in order to remove some questions. Obviously, home projectors are designed for showing movies as well as for video games.

If you are interested to read a detailed and extremely boring article about home projectors, here it is.

Here we will also talk about home projectors in the most general terms. “Home projectors” of the initial price group come from “ordinary” budget office / school projectors. In total, there are three resolution options for home projectors. The standard is Full HD (1920×1080), a very economical option is 1280×800 (WXGA, HD). Well, at the price above $5000 somewhere “beacon” 4K projectors.

Bright representatives of full HD projectors are BenQ W1070 and Epson EH-TW5200. By the way, a good selection of full HD projectors reviews from Projectorcentral.com is available here.

For the price of Full HD home projectors start from about $900, but their price increases as the main features improve. The main thing that distinguishes home projectors from ordinary projectors is the room conditions. If a conventional projector is aimed primarily at a partially lit room, the user will want the best image in the home environment by turning off the light. When the light is turned off, a completely different principle of achieving high image quality starts to work. If, in a lighted room, legibility and contrast are achieved primarily by the brightness of the projector, then in the dark too high a brightness becomes undesirable and there is a clear standard regarding the maximum brightness of white. If your maximum brightness is fixed, then contrast is achieved by improving black, that is, reducing the brightness of black light.