need some help here... I have a feature film looking to showcase for a group of people who helpped to create it... Need to project a dvd in a theatrical enviorment. Any suggestions on lcd projectors to rent in order to get the best image possible.
Please dont boggle me with tech talk.. i have a simple mind...
group of about 100 people... small theatre with EXCELLENT sound....and I have a QUALITY dvd
I need a bright clean crisp as close to film like picture as possible.

MY DVD looks like a film on a television...
please help
thank you
Jack celli

Many modern theatres already have digital projection already in place to play advertising.

If you have to bring your own, you need to learn a few tech tricks or your shiny video is going to look absolutely awful.

Most LCD projectors are optimized for Powerpoint, not video. At the least you need to get the manual and send the projector color bars to set it up semi-properly. Even then you may need to further adjust contrast, and brightness, gamma if the projector is so equipt, just to get a reasonable image.

You also want to preview the quality of the image during slow, medium and fast movement. Some of the recent line-doublers that are use to increase the resolution of the video image up to the resolution of the projector, cause some really unpleasant artifacts. Several I have used make it look like the video is being 'bump-mapped' by an image of small waves.

If you have a choice, get a DLP rather than a LCD projector. The DLP technology tends to be kinder to video. All other setup issues remain.

Even in a dark theatre, I'd go for 3000 lumens or so, a high contrast ratio and a fast response so you don't get motion trails generated by the projector.

Probably more than you wanted to know but if you want the video shown to its best, you have to know enough to project it properly.

I think pretty much any projector from Runco would do the job. I saw a Runco DLP projector used in a small movie theater once and it looked pretty good. Marantz and Dwin also make nice projectors, but I'm not sure if they'll work in a movie theater type of setting. Of course, these are really expensive projectors and probably hard to find, but since you said you wanted to rent and you wanted the best, here they are.


~Sumesh

I'd be surprised if a good rental house couldn't help you make a selection based on the size of the room/projection distance and your need to display video rather than computer screens.

As said earlier most theaters will probably have at least one
room with an LCD/DLP projector in it. A guy I know made a
two hour movie which was projected by something they had
inhouse there together with a DVD player they already had
there.

Check with the cinema first. Otherwise, as Ken pointed out,
a rentel house should be able to give you good advise if
you give them the roomsize and source format etc.