HELP! Projector for church service use.

[SangYuP]

Hi, my church is in the market for a new projector and I am having a hard time choosing one. Our old projector IBM ILC300 (Infocus LP650) just died so we want to upgrade to a better one.

I'm currently looking for at least 3000 lumens for the brightness. Also, is there an advantage of LCD or DLP? What about contrast? This projector will be used during service so the lights will be on and it has to be bright enough in decent lighting. It will be use mostly for powerpoint slides (text & graphics), and photos and on rare occasions for videos. The budget the church has given me is around $3000. Of course if there is a projector that costs a little more with great features, I can convince the church to spend a little more.

Here are the following models that I have been looking at so far. Please let me know if they will work or if there is something better out there. I noticed the models I looked at are sort of old (released over 1 year ago).

Dell 5100MP
Optoma EzPro EP759
NEC LT380

 

[The Dukester]

We bought Sanyo LCD units for our church and are pretty satisfied with them. If you are going to use them for DVD watching (not likely) during the daytime, they will be somewhat dark. For hymns, scriptures, announcements your basic powerpoint type stuff) and some video, they work pretty well. We used the middle of the road units, which should be in your pricerange. They have higher priced units that are torches. I don't have any experience with the DLP units as most all of the churches I've been to or know about in my area use LCDs.

If you don't have a local rep, you can call and ask the folks at Projector People or Visual Apex, both reccomended vendors here on AH. They will be glad to make a suggestion and give you pricing. Specs on pjs are on their website.

 

[Audioholics]

They are actually pretty helpful. Normally I'd recommend staying with LCD, but the recent DLP models are looking just as good and are just as bright. You need at least 3000 real lumens (perhaps more if you are projecting a long distance), so look for that 'ANSI' next to the rating. Also pay attention to the lens and throw distance.

An advantage to LCD is that some of those have lens shift which makes for an easier installation, but if you do it right this probably won't matter.

 

[BMXTRIX]

Lumen rating is always going to be a factor of room ambient light and screen size. In a standard flourescent light setting with 'average' viewing light in the room you want about 50 lumen per square foot on screen. So, take your screen width time screen height - call it 6' by 8' = 48 square feet and then mulitply that by 50 = about 2500 lumen. Add a good 20-30% 'lie' factor for projector manufacturers and you are at 3,000 = 3,250 lumen recommended for that screen size.

The clear advantage for LCD is that there will be no rainbow effect visible to the viewing audience. This may seem trivial, but there is no question that RBE (rainbow effect) can cause eyestrain and headaches to certain people and that certain people are very susceptible to it. In an unknown audience who may be viewing for extended periods, I would lean towards LCD over DLP. Not for image quality, but for the unknown audience and extended viewing.

Lens shift and throw distance to the screen may matter a great deal if you are trying to replace that old projector with a new model to go right in its place. It is NOT as simple as just putting any new projector in as almost every projector is a bit different with where it is allowed to be positioned.

I have now worked at two different commercial companies and have seen the work of several other commercial companies and almost always, they lean towards using LCD for their setup to ensure audience compatibility.

FYI: I didn't consider myself to be very RBE sensitive until I came into the commercial world and started seeing 2x DLP projectors. Nasty things that give me headaches! LCD or 5x+ DLP for me only.