ANSI (American National Standards Institute) lumens refers to the brightness of a projector. Fundamentally speaking, the higher the number, the brighter the projector. How bright the projector is governs how big a screen it can be used on and/or how much ambient light is bouncing around in the room. If you are projecting onto a 6’ wide screen a 2000 lumen projector should be perfectly adequate even in normal office lighting conditions but if you had a larger screen or much brighter room a more powerful projector would be necessary. As a rule of thumb, to achieve a bright image with good contrast in normal office lighting, allow about 500 lumens/meter2. Typically home cinema projectors range from 1000 – 2000 lumens because most people don’t have a screen any bigger than 6’ – 8’. Our Panasonic PT-AE3000E projector is 1600 lumens and looks amazing on a 10’ screen in a fully darkened room! The same is true if you need to hire a projector for your office meeting but because there is likely to be more ambient light a more powerful projector may be required. We have 2000 lumen Sanyo XW57 projectors for hire, ideal for our 6’ screens and 3500 Lumen Sanyo XP41 projectors for larger screens and/or more ambient light. If you need to hire a projector to be used on a much larger screen we have Panasonic DLP projectors that go up 10000 lumens, Sanyo LCD projectors up to 15000 lumens and Christie DLP projector up to 18,000 lumens. If you require brighter projections than a single projector can provide, it is possible to double stack projectors, effectively doubling the brightness.

The Aspect Ratio of an image is the width divided by the height and are expressed as x:y. The most common today are 1.33:1 also known as 4:3, TV format and 1.75:1, commonly expressed as 16:9 or HDTV which are found in both projectors and computer monitors. Even wider formats such as 2.35:1 are also used in feature films. We supply both 4:3 and 16:9 projectors and screens as well as 2.35:1 and custom screen sizes.

All of our LCD (liquid crystal display) projectors are 3 LCD models and work by splitting the light using a series of mirrors and prisms through three LCD panels, one for each colour of the spectrum, red, green, and blue. The light is split into the 3 colours by a polariser and as the light passes through each of the three LCD panels individual pixels can be opened or closed to allow light to pass through or not. The combination of these open and closed pixels across the 3 LCD panels can produce a wide range of colors and shades in the projected image. Most LCD projectors use Metal Halide Lamps because they output an ideal colour temperature and a broad spectrum of color. They are also extremely efficient so LCD projectors are often fairly small and portable. All of our Sanyo projectors are LCD and can be found here. Our Panasonic projectors are all DLP and can be found here with the exception of the PT-AE3000E. Our Christie projectors all use the latest in DLP technology and are found here.