Bringing the cinema experience into your home through home cinema is gaining amazing popularity these days, and why shouldn’t it? By creating a home cinema in your own house, you avoid all the unpleasant experiences of the real movie cinema. Teenagers who talk on their cell phones during a film, children who are loud and won’t behave, expensive candy and soda, and getting a neck-cramping seat in the orchestra section can all be forgotten as you enjoy Hollywood films in the comfort of your own home with your family. Well, almost. Even in your own home, your teenager can still talk on their cell phone, your children probably misbehave, candy and soda are expensive even at the bulk discount warehouse, and if you choose the wrong projector, you can have worse than neck-cramps. While we can’t do anything about cell phones, your children, or the price of candy and soda, we can help you to decide on how to choose a home cinema projector.

Choosing a home cinema projector is much more difficult than choosing a data projector or a portable projector because there isn’t as much flexibility with home cinema projectors. Chances are, you’re going to place your home cinema projector in a fixed location and run some cables to it from your DVD player or other video source, turn it on and watch a movie or sports game. While it sounds easy, there are some technical aspects that you’ll have to consider.

In truth, creating a home cinema requires quite a bit of planning on your part. There are lots of hidden aspects of home cinemas that you might not have thought about. Depending on how immersive of a home cinema experience you wish to have, a projector might be the least of your worries. Though it’s beyond the scope of this article, we should mention that projection screens, sound systems, seating, and many other aspects of a home cinema should also be given priority for yours. Since those individual concerns require there own articles, we will concentrate strictly on the projector.

As with portable and office projectors, features are what differentiate one home cinema projector from another. Brightness, resolution, aspect ratio, and everything other specification should help you decide on which projector to choose. You’ll obviously need certain features while you may not use others, but it will be easy to decide on what features you do need, or at least the core features.

Choosing the Best Resolution

Resolution is the single most important specification of a home cinema projector. The resolution of a projector determines how sharp a picture is as well as the aspect ratio of the picture, and whether or not a projector is HDTV compatible. Most home cinema projectors today sport a WXGA (1280 x 720) resolution, also known as 720p in HDTV specifications. 720p is provides widescreen viewing at a 16:9 aspect ratio, allowing for you to see more than your traditional 4:3 aspect ratio SDTV. Most widescreen DVDs today will provide a 720p picture, as well as some HDTV programming. One of the other benefits of a 720p projector is that most of them will also display the 1080i HDTV format through some scaling. This allows for some flexibility in what you watch, though scaling does cause for some image degradation, whether you scale up or down from the original image.

The new widescreen home cinema resolution is the HD (1920 x 1080p), or simply 1080p. 1080p provides the best image quality for High Definition programming currently. While it is still not widely used, it will become the new standard format in the future. If you intend on buying a future-proof projector that will not go obsolete any time soon, then 1080p is the way to go. Both the new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray media devices will be supporting 1080p and using relying on it heavily. However, while 1080p is the best of widescreen home cinema, it does come at a heavy cost, with most 1080p projectors being several thousand dollars.

While there are other resolutions out there, they are either obsolete or special circumstance use. For home cinemas, there really are only the two options mentioned above that are considered for use in today’s home cinemas.

Choosing the Correct Brightness

After you choose the best resolution for your projector, brightness will be your next consideration. While it’s thought that brighter is better, it’s not exactly true. Bright projectors are good in home cinemas where there is a lot of ambient light, but bright projectors in dark environments can cause eyestrain or just be unwatchable. Luckily, even if you overcompensate for your home cinema, most projectors have brightness adjustment so that you can adjust it to a proper level. For long projection distances, a brighter projector is also necessary, though, this is only a consideration for a small amount of home cinemas since most projectors are placed about 15 ~ 20 ft. away from the screen at most.

Looking at a Lens

While there are hundreds of minor features in a home cinema projector, there are still some more prominent features to consider such as the throw distance of the projector. Since most home cinema projectors will be in a fixed location, and that location is probably already determined even before the projector is bought, it is important to measure how large the projected image will be at a given distance. Usually, throw ratios are given in a screen size to distance format.

Lens shift goes hand-in-hand with throw ratio as being a necessity. Depending on where you mount your projector, you may need to move the picture up or down to accommodate for the mount. To move a picture without moving the projector requires a lens shift, either horizontal or vertical depending on the mounting. So be sure to look closely if at a projector’s lens and if there are multiple lenses available to allow for it.

Still, even after you consider all the other features of a home cinema projector, it is highly recommended that if you are building a serious home cinema, that you hire a professional to do the construction and installation. When you consider wiring and mountings, it may be a bigger job than you can handle by yourself.

You can find a complete list of Home Cinema Projectors by manufacturer listed here.

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