Front projectors

Front projectors throw an image onto a screen from the audience side of the room. They showed up both in home entertainment and, earlier, as their own top-level row. Both links come here.

Throw distance is the space between the lens and the screen for a given image size. A short-throw model sits close to the wall. A standard lens in a shallow room paints a small picture or you move the couch. Lumens describe brightness in a dark room more honestly than in a sunny one. Ambient light washes a projector out long before it washes out a television. The lamp has a rated life and it dims before it fails. Replacement lamps are model-specific. A filter on LCD projectors clogs and then the lamp overheats and shuts the unit down mid-film. DLP sets trade that filter for a color wheel, which is the source of the rainbow flash some people see in the credits.