Video Projector Specs LIE

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rfrazier

rfrazier

Well-known member
Sep 30, 2020
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Hi all. This thread is inspired by the discussions of @Steve s validrive utility to detect FAKE thumb drives. There's a lot of FAKENESS in the world of marketing. It drives me insane and makes me mad. I had occasion a while back to buy a decent low-mid grade (depending on your point of view) video projector. It's native 1080p DLP and cost $ 600. I can run it with room lights on and still get a decent but not great picture. If you're using a white projection screen, the main determinate in whether this works is the brightness of the projector. More recently, that projector started giving me intermittent fan failures and I was considering buying a replacement or fixing it, etc. It's actually throwing fewer temper tantrums lately so I'm still using it. But, in doing research I found ALL KINDS of fake specs in the ads. WOW, I can get a 1080p high brightness projector with great image quality for $ 70 instead of the $ 600 I paid originally. WhoHoo! Er, NO, YOU CAN'T. They have a hundred different ways to FAKE it. Is it one LCD or three LCD? Is it LCD or DLP? Does the focus vary at the edge due to the cheap plastic lens? Can you adjust keystone manually or electronically or not at all? Is it 1080p NATIVE, or does it take a 1080p signal and downscale to 480p or whatever? What are the inputs? What are the outputs? What are the adjustments? Does it have an LED lamp or an ARC lamp? Etc. I'm sure you engineers can relate. Details MATTER.

And, one of my favorite things to hate in ads is claims for brightness. Here's a little blurb from a review I recently posted about a projector screen but this part is really about the projectors.

"With room lights on, the picture is still usable though with the projector capable of 3300 ANSI lumens of brightness. Don't even consider using a cheap $ 100 - $ 200 projector with 300 - 400 ANSI lumens for an application with ambient lights on like this. When a cheap projector ad quotes lumens (not ANSI lumens) and says something like 9,000 lumens. Multiply that by ~ .03 - .04 to get ANSI lumens (based on my research). So, 9,000 lumens is about 270 to 360 ANSI lumens."

Would a $ 100 - $ 200 projector work for you with your needs and requirements and preferences? It might. But it's pretty darn sure you won't get everything you would with a $ 600 - $ 2000 one. I don't believe in buying the most expensive thing in any market segment. But, it's also true you generally don't get what you don't pay for.

So, this is just a little rant about fakeness in ads, which I hate. You have to read every word of the ad. You especially have to note what they DON'T say. If there's something they can rave about, they'll probably rave about it. And you have to read legitimate reviews too if you can find them. Fakeness is an evil pandemic scourge on the Earth!

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron
 
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Hi all. I appreciate the likes a couple of you gave the post. Glad the info is helpful. I was looking over the review I had posted elsewhere. I found another paragraph I thought I'd post here which is relevant to projectors. Not so much an element of fake marketing, but a misunderstanding some people have about the way projectors work.

"SCREEN DOOR EFFECT - This is not about this screen, but is about projectors. I have a 1080p DLP projector and cannot speak about any other. Some people complain about the "screen door" effect. This means that if you're say closer than 4'-6' from the screen, you see a very fine lattice of horizontal and vertical dark lines in light scenes. It resembles looking through a screen door. This is NOT a problem. It's a side effect of the way DLP systems work, where each pixel is driven by a tiny mirror on the DLP chip (stands for digital light processing or something similar) and there are tiny gaps between them. You WANT to see the screen door if you're very close. That means your projector is PROPERLY FOCUSED. If you don't see the screen door when you're close, the projector is NOT properly focused and you're just adding fuzziness to the picture. If you're further away from the screen, the picture should appear crystal clear to your eyes assuming it was in focus when it was shot."

Hope this is also helpful.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron
 
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