How we choose

The default order is best value, which is not the same as cheapest. Value here means confirmed quality for the price, so a projector that cannot confirm anything about itself cannot be good value at any price. That is the whole philosophy, and the rest of this page is the arithmetic behind it.

Throw ratio is distance divided by image WIDTH, not diagonal. A 16:9 screen is 0.8716 times as wide as its diagonal, so a 120 inch screen is 2.7 m wide. Multiply that by the projector's throw ratio and you have the distance it needs.

Using the diagonal instead, which a surprising number of calculators do, overstates every required distance by about 15 percent. Each product page prints the real table for 80, 100, 120 and 150 inches.

Brightness is checked against a target screen luminance measured in foot-lamberts. The calculation is screen area in square feet, times the target for your room light, times 1.3 for picture mode, divided by screen gain.

The targets are 16 foot-lamberts for a dark room, 25 for low light, 40 for moderate light and 60 for a bright one. The 1.3 multiplier is there because manufacturers quote brightness in the brightest picture mode, which is usually too green to watch; a calibrated mode gives up roughly a quarter of it.

A worked example: a 120 inch screen is about 4 square metres, so moderate light needs 43 square feet times 40 times 1.3, which is about 2,240 lumens. A projector within 20 percent of that figure passes with a note rather than failing outright, because brightness varies between samples and a hard edge at exactly 100 percent would be false precision.

Only two kinds of brightness figure can satisfy a room light requirement: one we have verified independently, and one the manufacturer published to a comparable standard, which means ANSI lumens or ISO 21118.

Everything else is recorded but never used. LED lumens, lux at a stated distance, and marketplace-only claims are all excluded from the brightness filter, from the brightness sort and from the value ranking. They are not converted, because there is no honest conversion. A projector advertised at 20,000 LED lumens and one measured at 3,000 ANSI are not comparable, and we will not place them on the same scale.

Native resolution is what the imaging chip addresses. Accepted input is what the projector will take from a cable. They are different columns here and they are never mixed.

A chip that shifts pixels four times per frame places all 8.3 million pixels of a 4K image, and we call that 4K. A chip that shifts twice places 4.15 million, which is 1080p doubled, and we call that 1080p however the manufacturer markets it. A 1080p chip that merely accepts a 4K signal is 1080p in every badge, filter, title and piece of structured data on this site.

4K DCI, at 4096 by 2160, has more pixels than 4K UHD, not fewer, so it counts as 4K and each row says which one it is.

The deal score is about price history, not about quality. It answers one question: is this a good price for this projector compared with what it has been recently and with what its peers cost.

A score only appears once we have at least 14 days of history and at least 20 price readings for that exact listing. Below either threshold the page says new price data, because a score built on four days is a guess wearing a number.

The score weighs the price against the 30 day median at 50 percent, against the 90 day low at 20 percent, and against the median for comparable projectors at 30 percent. A price 25 percent below a reference earns full marks for that component; further discount adds nothing, which stops a pricing error producing a perfect score. The class comparison is dropped entirely when fewer than 4 comparable projectors have a price, rather than scoring against a median of two.

Deal score and room fit are separate systems and are never combined into one number. A projector can fit your room perfectly and be a bad price today.

Value is a quality score divided by price. The quality score is built only from confirmed figures: resolution, confirmed brightness, contrast, throw flexibility, published latency and the rest.

There is a floor. A projector whose quality score falls below 0.25 gets no value score at all, however cheap it is, and the same applies to any projector with no confirmed brightness figure. This is deliberate: without it the cheapest unverifiable projector on the market would sit at the top of every page, which is exactly the outcome this site exists to prevent.

Affiliate commission is not an input to any ranking, sort or filter here. We do not know and do not record what any given link pays.

We publish no ratings and no reviews, and we make no hands-on claims. We have not tested these projectors, and saying otherwise would be a lie that is easy to tell and hard for you to check.

We do not say lowest ever, we run no countdowns, and we show no stock pressure. A struck-through price appears only when Amazon's own data says there is a list price to strike through.