‘how to create the ultimate home cinema & entertainment experience?’
Optoma - Home Cinema Top Tips
Client Spokesperson: Adam Dent, Sales Manager Italy, Middle East & Africa
So, you’ve managed to convince your wife that a Home Cinema is what you really need to complete your home. With the hard work done, you can now settle down with the Internet and a mountain of brochures to choose the individual components.
Whilst it is possible to spend some very significant sums of money on Home Cinema equipment, it is also possible to achieve an excellent result on more modest budgets. Essentially you will need a DVD, HD or BluRay player, a sound system and a display device (Plasma, LCD or Projector) as well as the various cables to connect them all together. Whilst many people are familiar with LCD or Plasma screens, the benefits of projectors are often overlooked. This is a great pity as a home cinema projector offers:
• Real contrast ratios that are significantly higher than LCD/Plasma screens (up to 10,000:1)
• An image size that is limited only by the distance of the projector from the screen
• Extremely attractive price points - an HD projector is significantly cheaper than a 72 inch LCD or Plasma screen
• A much neater and portable solution
All in all, projectors do offer some fantastic advantages over more familiar display technologies. Of course even when you have made the decision that a projector is for you, then you must decide ‘Which projector?’
The key factors to consider are:
1. Resolution – For a dedicated Home Cinema setup, the minimum resolution is 720p (1280 x 720 pixels). For maximum detail the best choice is 1080p (1920 x 1080 pixels). Look for a product that is High-Definition (HD) Ready.
2. Screen Format – There are 2 basics screen formats - 4:3 and 16:9 Widescreen (simply the ratio of the width to the height of the screen). Data projectors are generally 4:3 format, for home cinema 16:9 is the standard format.
3. Contrast Ratio – To ensure that you can really see all the detail of your movie, especially during darker scenes in a film, choose a Digital Light Processing (DLP) projector with high native contrast. Ensure that high contrast does not come at the cost of very low brightness; some projectors offer ‘Theatre’ style modes which produce a brightness of only 300 lumens!
4. Brightness – Home cinema projectors do not need to be as bright as data projectors. For use in a darker room, anywhere between 1000 - 1400 lumens will be perfectly adequate. Ensure that the light output in high contrast mode is bright enough to be comfortably visible.
5. Maintenance requirement – Certain projector technologies require air filters, which have to be cleaned at set periods. Optoma DLP projectors have sealed optical units, requiring no air filtration and therefore no set maintenance.
6. Interfaces – As a minimum a dedicated Home Cinema projector should have High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) and component interfaces.
7. Warranty – Optoma offers a standard product warranty of 1, 2 or 3 years (depending on model).
8. Screen – There are numerous projection screens available in the market and it is possible to spend some phenomenal sums of money for the best models. Undoubtedly a proper screen will improve your viewing experience; however a projector will produce a reasonable quality image when projected on a (preferably) white wall.
You may decide that a dedicated space for Home Cinema is not what you need at present, in which case an all-in-one solution may best suit your requirements. Offering a combination of projector, DVD player and sound system a product like Optoma’s DV11 gives you all the benefits of big screen entertainment, in a single package that is extremely portable (weighing 3.5 kg) and very easy to set up (just a single power cable). With a short throw lens, you can create a 72-inch diagonal image with the Optoma DV11 just 2 metres from the projection surface.
