How We Ranked the 6 Best Projectors Under $1,000

Projectors have two ways you can realistically measure brightness: in lumens or in nits. Lumens are more common, but brightness in general matters because projectors have to project light strongly enough that it overcomes ambient light without losing detail or color.

Most of the time, a projector is going to be used in a fairly dark room to help give the unit the best chance of displaying content the way it was intended, but higher lumens output let you watch content in progressively bright spaces – or across longer distances on bigger screens. For standard dynamic range content, we recommend at least 1000 lumens for most home applications, but more isn’t a bad thing, and 3000 lumens or more are ideal.

High dynamic range content requires enough light to make the dramatic differences in a scene actually stand out. Otherwise, the same rules that would apply to SDR brightness apply here.

You’ll want a HDR brightness of 2000 lumens at least to use the projector and enjoy HDR content the way it was intended, but a higher brightness is always nicer. Low brightness will make content look dimmer, less vibrant and can cause the image to completely disappear if the ambient light is too strong.

Different color gamut are used for different types of media and represent the colors used by that form of media when creating the content. In the case of DCI-P3, this gamut is favored by film creators for making movies, so being able to cover large parts of it with a projector means the projector is better at showing movies.

We recommend a coverage of at least 90% to ensure you can reproduce accurate colors when watching movies and enjoy the films the way they were intended to be seen. Any lower and you begin to lose accuracy, which impacts how the movie looks by distorting the director’s creative vision.

If you watch a lot of high-definition TV such as HD sports, you’ve experienced the Rec.709 gamut. This gamut is employed mostly by HD television, so covering as much of it as you can is ideal. Fortunately, the Rec.709 gamut is smaller than the DCI-P3 gamut, so if you have good coverage of DCI-P3, it’s very likely you have good coverage of Rec.709. This gamut is also known as BT.709.

Regardless, we recommend you have a Rec.709 coverage of at least 90%, especially if HD TV is what you spend most of your time watching. Not covering enough of the gamut directly contributes to seeing inaccurate colors on things like sports uniforms or otherwise vibrant sets on your favorite TV shows.

Input lag is primarily an issue when it comes to playing video games on your projector. If you’re trying to enjoy fast-paced shooters or are using projector to play competitive modes, you’ll need a low input lag to “keep the projector out of your way”, so to speak. High input lag causes delays in your inputs and makes it harder to react to action on screen because your own physical reactions start to count for less than the projector’s ability to process what you’re doing.

For this reason, we recommend an input lag of 40 ms or less, but lower is always better, and for really competitive games we’d recommend less than 15 ms. Any more than that and your projector is better suited to playing games casually, though if you don’t play anything fast paced, input lag is less of an issue.