Short-Throw Opens The Door to More Home Cinema Rooms

Has anyone finished Netflix yet?!!

With Coronavirus taking hold across the UK and more of us having to stay at home to self-isolate, having a home cinema room or big-screen media room has never been more appealing to help while away the hours and days confined to the house. Has anyone finished Netflix yet?!!

Until recently, having a cinema projector in your media room or living room required a reasonable sized room and either a ceiling-mounted projector permanently in view, or the space above the ceiling to accommodate a motorised projector lift. However, a new technology, ‘short-throw’ projectors gives greater flexibility about where projectors can be mounted and the size of room required to get the genuine home cinema experience.

Short-throw projectors per se are not new. They have been popular for many years within the education sector as a means of providing large-scale ‘interactive whiteboards’ in classrooms and lecture theatres. However those projectors weren’t suitable for home cinema use. They didn’t have the necessary copy protection on the HDMI input (known as HDCP), required to playback movies from DVD, Blu-ray disks or other media sources such as Sky TV and Netflix/Amazon Prime Video streaming. They also didn’t have the necessary brightness, contrast range or colour depth necessary to accurately present films and TV shows (PowerPoint presentations just aren’t critical in these respects).

That’s all changed.

Ultra-short Throw Projectors for Home Cinema Use

A number of manufacturer’s are now offering short-throw (and ultra-short throw) projectors that address all these shortcomings. So now you have the option to mount the projector on the ceiling immediately in front of the screen it is projecting onto (no more casting shadows on the screen as people stand up and get in the way of the image). Even better, the projector can be ‘hidden’ in carefully-designed furniture located just below the projection screen.

High quality lenses are used, and many manufacturers deploy a a chipset that pre-warps the image, or applies geometry corrections that cancels out the warping and keystoning inherent in wide-angle lenses that are tilted away from the level. A lens with a short throw ratio possesses the capability to display large visual frames from small distances without any image spill and blurry visual quality. Many of these projectors have the ability to produce an image with 100-inch size from less than 2 feet away. The short throw lenses are designed to break the monotony of old projection distance and allow you to enjoy a movie without worrying about space.

Cyberhomes have already installed this new projector technology into some media rooms, and we’ll be posting a case study on one of them in the near future.