Office Projectors Best Buy
In order to create a large image most projectors need to be positioned far from the screen. This distance is called the throw distance, and can be anywhere from 8 to 15 feet, depending on the projector and desired image size. Short-throw projectors are convenient for small rooms or other situations where space is limited. The BenQ HT2150ST can sit much closer to the screen than a standard projector, and is bright enough to use in a room with some ambient light.
office projectors best buy
If you want to get your projector up and out of the way, you need a mount. The Peerless-AV PRGS-UNV Projector Mount is one of our favorites due to its flexibility and how easy it is to set up correctly. The mounting arms are highly adjustable and removable, so it can handle anything from a tiny DLP projector to the gigantic JVC D-ILA projectors that most mounts cannot fit. The dials let you easily make small adjustments to the projector to get it level with the screen and produce the best-quality image without much work. After years of using this mount and going through dozens of tested projectors, we have yet to find one that the Peerless-AV cannot handle.
As projectors have become more widely used, they've also become more specialized. A model intended for showing business presentations in rooms with bright lighting, for example, needs higher brightness than one designed for watching movies in a dark room, but it doesn't need the same level of contrast or color accuracy. In this guide, we'll first cover our favorite picks, chosen from models we've tested, for a variety of needs. We'll also explain why we picked each one for that specific use. Then, we'll take you through the factors you should consider when shopping for a projector to help ensure you find the best match for whatever you plan to use it for.
The Epson Pro Cinema LS12000 is pricey, but it's actually a near-bargain for the image quality it delivers. Epson is known for pixel-shifting LCD projectors whose images, thanks to lens quality and video processing, are virtually indistinguishable from a true 4K UHD picture while using only half as many pixels on screen. The LS12000 keeps the same emphasis on top-quality lenses and processing while boosting the pixel count to a full 3,840 by 2,160. The result is more detail than we've seen from any pixel-shifting 4K DLP projector.
All colors and no lag make a brilliant 4K projector: That's the Optoma UHD55 in a nutshell. Designed for both gaming and home entertainment, the Optoma UHD55 offers 4K resolution (3,840 by 2,160 pixels, via DLP technology and TI's fast-switch pixel shifting), superb color output, and the short input lag that gamers demand. It delivers a faster response at 4K than most projectors can manage, putting it within the range that a serious gamer would consider acceptable. Even better, the lag dropped by roughly half, to 8.6ms, for 1080p/120Hz input.
Available with or without a bundled ALR screen, the Epson EpiqVision Ultra LS500 can give you what amounts to a 4K, giant-screen smart TV ranging from 100 to 130 inches (depending on the screen size) for far less than a flat-screen TV of that size. It's pricier than most competing DLP-based UST projectors, but it also offers more, starting with the highest brightness by far of any laser TV projector we've tested.
Billed as a smart laser TV and priced at what passes for entry level for its category, the Hisense 100L5G-Cine100A bundles a 100-inch ambient light rejection (ALR) screen with a projector (the LG5) that offers the best image quality we've seen in its price range. Hisense aims the LG5 at first-time buyers of ultra short throw (UST) projectors, and also sells it as the 120L5G-Cine120A, which comes with a 120-inch screen.
The Vankyo Leisure 495W Dolby Audio is far from the only home entertainment projector in strictly bargain-basement territory, but it's the best we've seen in that price range, at $299 list and selling on Vankyo's website for $179.99 at this writing. It delivers 1080p (1,920 by 1,080) native resolution along with more-than-acceptable color accuracy and contrast for casual viewing. And its design guarantees that it can't show rainbow artifacts.
Whether you're serious about gaming and want a native 1080p room-to-room portable gaming projector with the shortest possible input lag, or are a more casual gamer who doesn't demand a short lag, but would love to have it, the X1300i will give you that advantage, along with the multiple game modes. Whichever group you're in, you'll appreciate that the same button on the remote that switches game modes also switches to the best picture modes for movies or video. Even those who aren't interested in gaming may want to consider the X1300i it for its combination of image quality for movies and video plus its high brightness, which is helpful for 3D viewing or a backyard movie night.
The BenQ GV30 offers both lower resolution (720p, or 1,280 by 720 pixels) and lower brightness (300 ANSI lumens) than most room-to-room portables, meaning streaming projectors with good enough audio so you don't need to lug an external sound system with you. It's also less expensive than most, and at just 3.5 pounds, it's the most portable as well, with a finger-size loop that makes it easy to carry. It's shaped pretty much like a 7-inch wheel of cheese, and it offers an innovative magnetic stand that stays in place when you pick up the projector but also lets you rotate the GV30 freely on the stand to adjust image height. The streaming is handled by a bundled Android TV dongle that fits in a hidden compartment.
If you want maximum portability in a value-priced room-to-room portable, the GV30 is the obvious choice. There are plenty of smaller, lighter projectors, but they can't match the full-bodied sound coming from the GV30's two 4-watt tweeters and 8-watt woofer, and few include built-in streaming. Although the 720p resolution is low for the category, the low brightness level means you probably won't notice any sense of soft focus or loss of detail at the image sizes you're most likely to use.
The Epson EX3280 pairs a low price with high-enough brightness to throw a suitably large picture for a midsize conference room or classroom with ambient light. And because it's built around three LCD chips, it can't be plagued by the rainbow artifacts that some people see with single-chip projectors and find annoying. The three-chip design also guarantees that color images will be fully as bright as you would expect from the 3,600-lumen white brightness rating.
Other important pluses include a crisp image to help make text more readable and show more detail in photorealistic images, vibrant color for graphics, and even good color accuracy and color saturation for photorealistic images. The last isn't true of many business projectors.
The EX3280 is aimed at offices and schools on tight budgets. Its XGA resolution (1,024 by 768 pixels) is a little low by today's standards and will necessarily limit its appeal if you need to show complex line drawings with fine detail, for example. And its 4:3 aspect ratio makes it a poor choice for showing widescreen movies very often. But if you simply need readable text in documents and presentations, vibrant color in graphics, and highly watchable film and video on a strictly occasional basis, the EX3280 can handle the job.
The Anker Nebula Solar Portable is our top pick for mini projectors, a category defined by weighing about two to four pounds, being small enough to fit in a briefcase or backpack, and still offering a reasonably bright image. Rated at 400 ANSI lumens, the Solar Portable was bright enough in our tests to light up a 90-inch diagonal, 16:9, 1.0 gain screen in a dark room. Its native resolution is 1080p (1,920 by 1,080), but it behaves like a 4K model with soft focus, connecting at 4K by default and downconverting the image to 1080p. Its home entertainment features include Android TV 9 for streaming over a Wi-Fi connection to your network, the ability to mirror mobile devices, and a built-in battery that's rated to last long enough on a charge to watch a full-length movie.
The built-in Android TV makes the Solar Portable of obvious interest to home users who want a small 1080p projector they can move easily from room to room to backyard, or bring along on a weekend getaway, while still being able to project a larger image than most large-screen TVs offer. Businesses can find it just as useful for a small conference room, while individual road warriors will find it light enough to carry without much effort and brighter than projectors that are smaller still.
The Kodak Luma 75 is literally small enough to lose track of if you accidentally cover it with a piece of paper. Basically the size of a 3-by-3-inch pad of sticky notes, it weighs just 5 ounces. But it's big enough to have an HDMI port, which means it can connect to most video sources, including mobile devices to mirror the screen. It's also bright enough to give you a 32-inch 16:9 diagonal image for short sessions in a dark room or an image size in typical office lighting closer to that of a letter-size page. Whether you're showing a business presentation or watching a movie, that's a lot bigger than you would get on your phone, and it comes from a projector that fits easily in a pocket.
Billed as an outdoor projector but perfectly useful indoors as well, the BenQ GS50 is designed to survive. Its IPX2 rating for water resistance translates to not having to worry about an unexpected light rain shower or minor splashes, while the drop-proof rating for up to a 2.3-foot fall means it's more likely than most projectors to survive a tumble. It doesn't hurt that it also delivers 1080p native resolution, was bright enough in our tests to fill a 90-inch screen in low levels of ambient light, and even comes with an Android TV dongle.
Home theater, home entertainment, and gaming projectors are all so similar to each other that one model is often marketed in two or three categories. These home-use projectors focus on color accuracy and contrast, usually adding controls to fine-tune color, reduce noise, sharpen images, and otherwise digitally enhance video and film. 041b061a72