Home projectors have come a long way over the past few years. Today’s models can handle a wide variety of multimedia content—films, photos, documents, and games—with aplomb, and many can play music files, as well. Although models with resolutions of 720p or less are still being sold, higher resolutions, from 1080p (1,920 by 1,080 pixels) and up are commonplace, and we’re seeing a wave of 4K versions over the past year or so, with horizontal resolutions of nearly 4,000 pixels. Plus, most home projectors offer a wide range of connection choices. With the way the state of the art is advancing, if your den or living room has the right characteristics, your next TV could well be a projector.
Just as no two homes are identical, though, projectors designed for home use vary widely in price, features, purpose, and capabilities. They range from tiny pico and palmtop projectors, to home theater models that can form the centerpiece of a basement home cinema, to home entertainment projectors bright enough to withstand the ambient light in a window-laden family room. Some are geared toward gaming, and most handle video (and photos) reasonably well. In addition, some data projectors can capably display video, and may be a good choice for someone whose home doubles as an office.
Here’s how to determine what sort of home projector is best for you.
First, Your Content: What Will You Project?
There are four basic kinds of content you can view with a projector: data, video, photos, and games. Most projectors can handle all of them, but each type of projector has its strengths with different content types.
Business (or data) projectors tend to be best at displaying data-centric presentations: PowerPoint slides, PDFs, Excel files, and the like. Consumer models, such as home entertainment, home theater, and video projectors, are more geared toward video viewing. Projectors that do well with video also tend to be good with photos. Gaming projectors are a small, but growing, niche and feature lower input lag.
Many consumer projectors are versatile, able to do justice to a range of content. If, say, you have a home office and occasionally need to show data presentations but also want to use the projector for entertainment, you may want to get a consumer model that also does well at showing data. Conversely, you could get a data projector that handles video content well.
Portability and Projection Tech
A home projector needn’t be a homebody. Many are portable enough to travel with, or at least to move easily from room to room. (The main exception is a home theater projector, which you’d most likely want to permanently install.) The gaming projectors we’ve seen are easy to bring along to a LAN party. Micro-projectors are highly portable, and come in both consumer and business models. (Many are good for both personal and business use.) This class of projector includes pico projectors, most of which can fit into a shirt pocket; palmtop models, which can fit in an outstretched hand; and some slightly larger models.
Most projectors are either LCD-based or use a Texas Instruments DLP (Digital Light Processing) chip along with a laser, LED, or LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon) light source.
Single-chip DLP projectors are potentially subject to what is known as the “rainbow effect.” Little red/green/blue, rainbow-like flashes may be visible, particularly in scenes with bright areas against a dark background. In some DLP projectors, the effect is minimal, but in projectors where the phenomenon is average to severe, people who are sensitive to these artifacts may find them distracting, particularly with video content. LCD projectors are immune to this effect, so they’re a safer bet if you or someone in your family is sensitive to the rainbow effect. That said, there are plenty of DLP projectors with excellent image quality.
Understanding Resolution and Brightness
Ideally, your projector’s native resolution—the number of pixels in its display—should match the resolution of the content you’ll most frequently be displaying. For videos and games, you’ll want a widescreen native aspect ratio such as 16:9 or 16:10. Both 1080p (1,920 by 1,080 pixels) and 720p (1,280 by 720 pixels) have 16:9 aspect ratios, while WXGA projectors (1,280 by 800 pixels) are 16:10. Today, however, 1080p should be your baseline for what you buy.
Both home theater and home entertainment projectors are best with 1080p resolutions, though many consumers are satisfied with less expensive 720p models. If you’re a more demanding user, you should consider a 4K projector with a resolution of 3,840 by 2,160 pixels, twice as many vertical and horizontal pixels as 1080p. Of course, you’ll need a 4K video source to make the best use of a 4K projector.
Consumer-level projectors range in brightness from less than 100 lumens for pico projectors to several thousand for video and home entertainment models. How bright your projector should be depends largely on two things: lighting and image size. If you’re okay with relatively small images and/or plan to project mostly in a darkened room, you can get by with lower brightness. A home entertainment projector for a family room should be brighter, around 2,000 lumens or a bit more.
Keep in mind that perception of brightness is measured logarithmically; it takes a lot more than doubling the number of lumens for an image to appear twice as bright. Thus, modest differences in rated brightness (say, 2,200 and 2,500 lumens) are usually of little significance.
Home Theater or Home Entertainment?
Home theater projectors are designed to be used under theater-dark conditions in a movie room. This can be anything from an elaborate, professionally designed home theater to a mixed-use room that can be set up for viewing movies. Such projectors usually eschew built-in speakers, as their owners prefer to yoke them to high-fidelity audio systems. Image quality, features, and resolution are important—most are 1080p or 4K, and many include 3D capabilities. Because you’ll be viewing the content in a dark room free of ambient light, a home theater projector needn’t be especially bright; you won’t want to go much above 2,000 lumens.
Home entertainment projectors, on the other hand, are more versatile than home theater models, and are generally used in places such as family rooms, where there may be considerable ambient light. They’ve become viable substitutes for TVs, and can project fairly large images without degradation. Thus, they tend to be brighter than home theater models. They also have built-in sound systems. As home entertainment projectors are geared to casual viewing, their image quality—though generally good—is seldom a match for that of home theater models.
Connection Methods: HDMI and More
Most home projectors offer multiple connection methods. Nearly all new models provide HDMI connectivity, which is good because it supports video resolutions of 1080p. Larger projectors have standard, full-size HDMI ports, while palmtop, pico, and other small projectors often have mini or micro HDMI ports, which require different cables (usually included with the projector).
Many home entertainment and home theater models have ports compatible with HDMI 1.4a or later, enabling projection from a Blu-ray player or set-top box, as well as a computer. Some come with HDMI ports that support MHL, providing a wired connection to compatible phones and tablets. Further, some models connect via Wi-Fi (either built in or through a dongle or adapter), as well as supporting media streaming via Intel Wireless Display (WiDi), Google’s Chromecast, and/or Miracast.
Composite video, component video, and S-Video are also common connection types on larger projectors, and we’re seeing more projectors offering direct connections to a computer via USB cable. USB Type-C ports are showing up on a growing number of projectors. Most USB-C ports support the DisplayPort over USB protocol, letting them behave, in terms of data and video transfer, like a DisplayPort connector. In addition, most support USB Power Delivery (USB PD), so that a plugged-in projector could supply up to 100 watts to power or charge a laptop or other device over a cable connected to the projector’s USB-C port (assuming the device can charge over USB-C, of course).
Many projectors also have legacy-style VGA ports, although HDMI is preferable for showing video from a computer. (See how we test projectors.)
Ready for Our Recommendations?
Below are our current top picks in home projectors. They vary widely in size, brightness, and features. All these projectors have one thing in common, though: high marks in our reviews. Be sure to also check out our overall top projector picks, as well as our favorite portable projectors.
