Home theater projector is a heart of your home theater

One of the displaying options for a home theater is a home theater projector. In comparing with plasma or LCD TV set these units are much smaller and take less space. Usually image is projected on the white wall, better solution (and costly one too) is a front or rear projection screen. The technology has improved tremendously and the size and weight of these projectors has dropped along with the prices. A front projector screen is starting at $100 and a solid home theater projector is $1000 or higher. In fact there are three types of projectors:

- LCD projector
- DLP projector
- D-ILA projector

LCD home theater projector

An LCD projector uses a projector lamp (lifetime up to 2000 hours or more) that projects light through 3 small (often .76" to 2.5" TFT) LCD panels. The image is then displayed through a single lens and onto a front projection screen or white wall. The brightness levels are usually 1500 ANSI lumens or more, which is plenty of image intensity for a screen, even with the room lights on. But usually it's better to go for a brightness level at least 2000 ANSI lumens.

Besides all other obstacles that these types of home theater projectors have (color quality, contrast ratio, and lack of deep blacks) the main one is a cost of a projector lamp which is nearly a half price (or more) of the projector itself. So after 2000 hours you should consider to invest into a new lamp. Although in some cases (when you want really big picture) this cost is acceptable.

DLP home theater projector

Every DLP projection system has an optical semiconductor known as the DLP chip (invented by Dr. Larry Hornbeck). Each chip may contain over 2,000,000 mirrors (1920 x 1080) which each correspond to a pixel of the video image. DLP chip is coordinate with a light source, graphics signal and a projection lens resulting a digital image produced by millions of its mirrors.

Two types of DLP home theater projectors

Business projectors and home theater projectors using DLP technology rely on a single chip configuration like the one displayed above. These types of projectors can create at least 16.7 million colors.





For very high image quality and very high brightness usage such as cinema, DLP projectors rely on a 3-chip configuration for displaying stunning images. Believe it or not but these monsters can display no fewer than 35 trillion colors.





Since a DLP projector reflects light rather than passing it through an LCD chip, more light is reflected toward the screen. This means that a DLP projector will run cooler, require a smaller fan, and will not have heat failure problems that could occur with an LCD projector.


If you are considering one of these for home theater use, you have to be careful in selecting one that is appropriate for home theater movies and not just computer data graphics.

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