Uproars Entertainment

What should I look for when purchasing an inexpensive projector for a home entertainment center?

Looking for a Projector for Home Entertainment (TV/Cable, etc.) and trying to decide what to look for in an inexpensive projector.

Public Comments

1. If you want High Definition, but don't want to spend the Big Bucks, look for a 720p -capable unit. 720p is "officially" HD, but its not the much ballyhooed (isn't that a great old word, "ballyhooed"?) 1080p, therefore the 720p projectors will be much less expensive and still give you GREAT results, especially if your intended projected image size is not going to be that big (80" diag 16:9 will make an awesome 720p size, by the way). But more specifically to your question, assuming HD is not what you're after and you just want a really good SD (standard def) image: 1. Stay away from "data-grade" projectors. these are always the least expensive because they were primarily built for mobile sales PowerPoint presentations off a travelling salesperson's laptop. NOT FOR MOVIES! A lot of people buy these things and then wonder why movies look so crappy on them. That's because they dont handle FULL MOTION VIDEO at all., so: 2. Look for a projector that boasts handling FULL MOTION VIDEO well. Any 3 year old inFocus projector that has the word "theater"in the model name is going to be a good value. Optoma made a series of DLP projectors over the past 4 years that did a good job. With ANY DLP, you want to look at the RPM (revolutions per minute) of the color wheel. The faster that spec reads on an info sheet, the better picture quality (in terms of motion artifacts, not resolution, necessarily) its going to have. Lastly (but not "leastly") look at the type of inputs it has: If its just a XVGA, forget about it. If its just composite video (the yellow-coded RCA input) forget about it. If its just composite and s-video...ummm...forget about it. You want that projector to at least have some sort of component (Y/pb/etc) "Red Blue Green" RCA inputs. If it has those, it will also have S-Video, too. Good luck and let me know how it goes!