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GCN Home > March 18, 2002 issue

LCD projectors run the gamut in size and power

By John Breeden II, GCN Staff

Balancing image quality and weight remains an issue

A couple of years ago, the GCN Lab predicted that digital projectors would become uniformly tiny and bright. Were we ever wrong.

Eight vendors responded to our call for travel-ready projectors with eight state-of-the-art but different LCD or digital-light-processing projectors.

Some models sacrificed brightness to light weight, others concentrated on color balance. Some had everything in one package but were so huge no one would want to carry them.

So the projector market is anything but standardized. On the flip side, there’s a projector out there for every purpose. We rated the eight projectors for weight, brightness, color balance, extra features, manageability and price.

Using a portable LX-101 light meter from Lutron Electronics Co. of Coopersburg, Pa., we measured incident brightness in lumens at 10 feet from the projector of a mostly white image. The projected image was the same size for each unit’s test. We tested color balance with a stock image for which GCN’s art department verified all the colors.

We burned in each projector for 10 hours prior to testing. In the past we have noted a significant drop-off in brightness at 10 hours of use and again after a few hundred hours. The typical lamp life is 1,000 to 2,000 hours, so our post-10-hour-burn testing shows the realistic brightness users can expect over most of a lamp’s lifetime. Our long initial burn, however, accounts to some degree for the discrepancy between our test results and the vendors’ marketing specifications.

Fairest is best

The Epson PowerLite 713c LCD projector, one of the first units we tested, seemed to strike a good balance among size, weight and features. We thought it would get a good grade but not wind up as the top performer.

Oddly enough, as we went on to other projectors, none beat the PowerLite’s reliable performance. Smaller projectors were too dim to be functional in all environments; brighter ones were huge by comparison.

The PowerLite 713c weighed in at 5.8 pounds, but its design minimized its bulk. At 10 feet, it could project an image at 700 lumens. The corners of the screen dropped off to 620 lumens, negligible to the naked eye; most people can’t distinguish a 100-lumen difference. Color tolerances were acceptable, images crisp.

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