Knitemare said:
I always wanted to try gaming in a projector, but since I havent tried one myself, i dont know how good or bad the image (brightness mostly) could be... Guess you have a high end one, and here in Mexico theyre pricey. |
As long as you can control ambient light, brightness won't be a big issue. If you want to game on a projector in daylight you'll need a pretty powerful one, 5000 lumens. 3000 lumens should be enough in daylight inside if you can keep the sun out.
Yoy can use projector central to check brightness for any projector and screensize, for example
http://www.projectorcentral.com/Optoma-HD142X-projection-calculator-pro.htm
Adjusting the screensize will give you the expected image brightness in fL (foot Lambert, 1fL is 3.426 nits for TV comparisons)
Cinema screens are rated at 14 fL (48 nits) peak white. That's about as low as you can go on a projector in a dark room for a good picture.
Tv's in daylight conditions typically operate at upto 50 fL (171 nits). That is more than enough to drown out any ambient light as long as the sun isn't hitting the screen ofcourse.
HDR 10 specifies upto 1000 nits (292 fL). You can forget about HDR on projectors, unless you have $60k laying around for a laser projector.
That site sets the cut off at about 22fL between watching in the dark or with ambient light. My projector sits at about 17fL, I prefer gaming in near darkness. (Still fine with a dimmer switch to see what you're eating :) There is other things to consider too, the more light the projector puts out, the more ambient light that creates by indirectly lighting up the room, the more light falls back on the screen drowing out deep blacks. (You can get more expensive directional reflective screens to prevent some ambient light from interfering with the picture)
Projectors aren't as good at contrast as tvs and together with it creating ambient light, expect a little loss in detail in contrast heavy scenes. It's perfectly fine if most of the screen is dark, or most of it well lit, yet some video games have scenes with very bright and very dark areas. In those cases the dark areas will suffer a little.
The slight loss in picture quality is worth the added imersion factor of a much bigger picture though.
