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The essential jargon of projectors

Projectors are undoubtedly one of the most valuable tools available today for educators and businesses alike. They allow us to share information with large groups of people with ease and can be found everywhere from the conference room to the classroom. However, like most technologies, projectors suffer from an overabundance of jargon surrounding them. We’re talking about words like lumens, DLP, LED, and LCD, not to mention phrases like short throw.

As the nation’s leading provider of projector technology to businesses and educators, we want our customers to be as confident in what they buy as they are in our pricing. That’s why we’ve put together this essential projector jargon modifier so you can find out which projector is the best for you.

The main types of projectors:

When it comes to projector technology, there are three main competing technologies, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Are:

• DLP (digital light processing): DLP projectors first appeared in the 1980s and are based on a DLP chip, made up of more than 2 million tiny mirrors, each less than one-fifth the width of a human hair. Each mirror moves independently to create a light or dark pixel. This information is then fed through a rotating color wheel to another chip, which can create up to 25 trillion colors in the most advanced models. The image then passes through the lens and out onto the projection screen.

The advantages of such a system are mainly related to maintenance, which requires less maintenance than LCD projectors thanks to a sealed, filter-free chip design. However, most DLP projectors do not support zoom lenses or lens shift functions, making them better suited for smaller environments rather than expansive screen setups.

• LCD (light glass display): LCD projectors use the same technology found in televisions, tablets, and smartphones to create projected images. Most LCD projectors use 3 LCD technology, which combines three liquid crystal displays to create your image. It begins with a light source that provides a beam of white light. This light passes to three mirrors that are shaped to reflect only a certain wavelength of light (red, green, and blue). Each beam of colored light hits an LCD panel, which creates an electrical signal that tells you how to arrange the pixels on the screen to organize them to create your image. These images are then combined on a prism to create a single image.

The advantages of LCD technology are most commonly related to cost. LCD projectors tend to be cheaper than their DLP or LED counterparts and are very efficient. They are also less affected by color and movement problems. On the downside, LCD screens are less capable of creating black levels and have poorer contrast performance.

• LED (light emitting diode): LED projectors replace the mirrors and the color wheel of the DLP projector with red, blue and green colored LEDs, which then shine directly onto the DMD chip and feed into the lens to create the displayed image.

LED projectors have a much longer lifespan than competitive projector lamps, rated at 10,000-20,000 hours of continuous use, up to 10 times longer than other projector lamps. Because LEDs use very little power and produce almost no heat, you will also enjoy lower running costs and almost no noise from an LED projector. The downside to LED projectors is that they cost more than competing technologies.

Other lingo about projectors:

In addition to the main types of projection, you will also find other phrases. These are some of the main ones:

– Lumens: A lumen is a measure of brightness, so more lumens equals brighter light (or image, in the case of projectors). For reference, a 100 watt light bulb would produce around 1,600 lumens. When purchasing a projector, keep in mind that the higher the indicated light levels, the better the projector will perform in ambient light conditions.

– Short shoot: Generally, projectors are located 8 to 10 feet from the surface on which they are projected. However, not everyone has the space to place a projector that far from its projection surface. That’s where short-throw projectors come in. They use smart mirror arrays to cast a large image with very little drift. They can be placed above or below the screen, depending on the model.

– Wide screen: Widescreen projectors are capable of projecting an image in a widescreen format, typically 16/9. This means that you will see less widescreen format when watching videos and enjoy a screen resolution similar to that of your computer.

– 4/3: Projectors that are described as 4/3 resolution are only capable of displaying a near-square 4/3 aspect ratio, which is what many projector screens and interactive whiteboards are designed for.

– Contrast ratio: A shrinkage ratio is the luminance of the brightest color (white) to the darkest color (black) that the system is capable of producing. A typical contrast ratio will look like 13,000: 1. The higher the number on the left, the greater the range between light and dark that the projector can produce.