Projector Reviews

2011 Home Theater Projector Comparison Report

This year’s report will be a good bit different than previous years’ 1080p Home Theater Projector Comparison report. Fewer significantly new projectors than in recent years, and a number of them unavailable or not available to late in the year.

As a result, we’ve created a shorter report this year, with our home theater season ending with the review of the JVC DLA-HD250 and the Mitsubishi HC9000D projectors, recently published.

1080p Projector Overview

Again this year, we use the same pricing categories as the 2010 home theater projector report, three of them. In addition, all the 1080p 3D projectors we’ve reviewed, were in the over $3500 price range. We did not feel any of them were sufficiently bright enough to be truly viable as 3D projectors, but consider 3D in this report. We will start with a listing and quick summary of each projector considered in this report. Links will be provided to our specs page (with manufacturer data sheets) and of course to the individual reviews. Finally, we have a limited number of direct comparisons between our favorite projectors within each class.

As I said last year, the recession scared the “heck” out of many manufacturers. I consider that responsible for the fewer all new home theater projectors and even the lack of significant upgraded models shown and released at or after CEDIA 2010 last September.

There are some interesting new projectors in this report, but not as many as we would like. Certainly we got to work with 4 different 3D capable projectors – one each from Sharp, Sony, JVC and Mitsubishi. First generation 3D 1080p home projectors turned out to do pretty nice job in terms of the 3D image quality, and all are at least very good 2D projectors.

We reviewed as many home theater projectors as we could, but still missed a few in the under $10,000 price range.

Let’s start with our listing of each home theater projector considered in this report. They are organized by our three price classes: