Best Projectors for Churches

This is the table that settles the argument in the committee meeting. Find your screen diagonal down the left, then read across to the column that matches how bright the room is during a service. The right hand column is the honest one for most sanctuaries with windows, and the left hand column only applies if somebody genuinely turns the house lights down for the whole service. Buying to the wrong column is how churches end up with a projector that looked fine in the shop and grey on Sunday.

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and almost nobody selling projectors volunteers it. A single-chip DLP projector makes color by spinning a filter wheel in front of one imaging chip, and part of that wheel is usually clear, which raises the white output without adding any color. The headline lumens figure is white brightness. The color brightness can be a great deal lower, and on a church screen that shows up as white text that looks bright and a color background or a video clip that looks washed out and dull.

A 3-chip 3LCD projector splits the light into red, green and blue and images all three at once, so it produces the same figure for white and for color. That is why a 3LCD projector rated at 4,000 lumens frequently looks better on a worship background than a single-chip projector rated at 5,000. When you compare two projectors, ask for the color brightness figure, and if it is not published, assume it is lower. The full argument is at three-chip versus single-chip.

Four things, in order of how often they happen. The screen is too small for the room, so the back rows squint at lyrics that are technically visible and practically unreadable. The fix is the six times rule, covered on the screen roundup and computed for your building at screen size. The projector is aimed crooked and corrected with keystone, which resamples the image and softens every letter on the slide. Square it mechanically and leave keystone at zero.

Then there is ambient light landing on the screen itself, which no amount of projector brightness fixes efficiently: light falling on the screen raises the black level, and contrast is what makes text readable. Move the fixture, or use an ambient light rejecting surface. And finally the wrong light source for the usage pattern, which is the laser versus lamp question. If the projector runs more than about six hours a week, laser wins on total cost before the fifth year. For placement, see projector placement in a sanctuary, and for the whole decision how to choose a church projector.