Better Projection Without Upgrading

By: Tim Adams

There are so many churches that struggle with their projection systems with washed out images, mismatched aspect ratios and resolutions leading to squished or stretched images, images that are larger than the screens they are throwing onto, or any number of other issues.

If you are struggling with the issues above, there are some steps you can take to utilize your current equipment while making some adjustments to maximize the investment your church made in that equipment.

Of course, there are caveats to the advice that follows-you often do have to upgrade your projector in order to fix issues such as you have too few lumens for the size screen you have, or to increase your resolution to fix readability, or take advantage of the benefits laser projectors deliver over lamp-based projectors.

However, there are a few potential areas to review in your church before going to the lengths of buying a new projection system.

Ambient Lighting

It’s important to understand that when you are reviewing specifications for a projector that those measurements were done in a pitch-black environment and could only represent the highest lumen measurement across the entire image when displaying a pure white image (called ISO lumens). The same goes for contrast ratios; it’s a somewhat dirty little secret the industry pulls in order to make claims of higher brightness and/or contrast ratios, both of which lead our brains to tell us we are seeing a high-quality image.

Being able to control your ambient lighting, or the lighting in the room you are projecting in, can be critically important to maximizing the projection system you already have. There are limits, though, and it’s important to understand how projection systems are specified in order to deliver a high-quality experience.

In order to properly calculate how many lumens you will need you must first measure your screen and get the square footage. With this number, we plug it into this formula: lumens / square footage * screen gain. Most matte white screens have a gain of 1.0 which makes it easy. The resulting number will be your foot-Lamberts measurement, which is a measurement of reflected light.

Generally, I want to see a number above 70 and I will increase the lumens in thousands until I get what I’m looking for. For example, if 4000 lumens doesn’t deliver 70fL (foot-Lamberts, abbreviated), then I will see if 5000 lumens will.

Once you have your fL measurement, you need to categorize your ambient lighting between bright, moderate, or dim. If you’re moderate or dim, you can likely get away with using your existing matte white screen (unless there are other reasons why you need to upgrade the screen, such as changing from 4:3 to 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio.

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