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.

Lens Shift is not too dissimilar to keystone correction as it allows flexibility in positioning a projector. As you might expect, lens shift refers to the physical movement of the lens inside the projector housing. This has the effect of moving the image left or right and up and down on the screen without having to move the whole projector and is a godsend when trying to ceiling mount a projector and can also help to reduce hot spots created when using high gain screens.