Projector distance, picture size etc.

[superhuman]

I'm considering delving into the projector market and am looking at possibly getting a panny ae200 or ae300 (if budget allows). I need to determine however if it is feasable due to the size of my room, as the optimum place to site the projector would put it no more than 5m away from the screen/wall i aim to project it onto. My question is this, at that distance will i get a good picture and one of reasonable size, and will it be confortable to watch where my seating position will be (approx 4m from the image).

Sorry if this sounds like a bit of a dumb question but i'm rather new to this projector lark.

Cheers in advance.

[Rad]

Hiya,

If you goto www.projectorcentral.com and find the projector you're thinking about buying.

They have a calculator which will give you screen size.

Cheers,
Rich.

[superhuman]

cheers bud

[Mr Sparkle]

Have you had a look at the new Hitachi PJ-TX10 ? Available for <£1K

This has a very versatile 'optical design' specifically for use in different sized living rooms/ home cinema set ups.

It has a full x2 zoom lens and vertical and horizontal lens shift. This can allow you to get pretty much the screen size you want/need in a variety of room sizes.

It also features motion adaptive progressive scan which basically provides an improved (de-interlaced) image from normal video i/p's (composite, s-video etc.)

Mr Sparkle

[superhuman]

That sounds intreging (sp?) i'll have to look into that.

Just been doing some calculations on screen size relative to viewing distance, i grasped from another thread that the recomendation is that optimum viewing distance should be 1.5 times the screen width, is this correct? Going off this i have calculated that with a viewing distance of around 4m (13.1 ft (157 inches)) I should have a screen/image width of around 2.7m (8.9 ft (106 inches)), does this sound reasonable. If this is correct i would have no problems what so ever with a 106 inch screen!

[WeirdFish]

1.5x is pretty much the minimum recommended, but it does depend on the projector and how much screendoor is gonna bother you.

[GrahamC]

1.5 to 2 times the distance is the recommended and with the lower res of the Hitachi I would say that 2x is the figure more likely to succeed.