Re: Projector opinions
This is from someone discussing home theater applications, but it graphically shows the issue of higher resolution not necessarily having any benefit in many situations, Chart: 1080P Does Matter - CarltonBale.com.
A good point as many people do not realize that DVDs are not HD and although some DVD players will upscale to 720p or 1080i/p on HDMI, that can actually be counterproductive unless you have a 1280x720 or 1920x1080 native display as the display would then have to rescale that scaled image to its native resolution. Similar with laptops, scaling a 720x480 resolution DVD image up to a 1366x768, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, etc. higher resolution, output from the laptop makes little sense if that then has to be scaled back down in the projector.
In many cases the contrast ratios of LCD and DLP have gotten closer and as I noted, many times it becomes a matter of comparing numbers that have very limited relevance to the actual application. Image contrast ratios are basically the peak projected white levels off the screen compared to the black level off the screen, which is often dominated by the ambient light off the screen and in many commercial applications results in image contrast ratios of 15:1, 10:1 or even lower, in which case whether the projector contrast ratio is 1,000:1, 5,000:1 or 10,000:1 may be of minimal relevance. It is different in cinema and home theater applications where the ambient light on the screen may be very well controlled and thus the image contrast ratios much higher.
