Any tips on digital projector feature for artwork?

[Richard Treen]

What digital projector features would be most useful for tracing artwork onto a large canvas?

Do more lumens mean the projector needs less room darkness to project the image clearly?

Is the ability to rotate the orientation a standard feature of digital projectors?

Do standard projectors allow for aspect ratio adjustment?

Does the potential for image distortion vary much from brand to brand?

There are a lot of mid range home cinema type projectors on Amazon.

There are also some pricey "Artograph" models with "keystoning" and grid features But are they so much different than the less art specific brands?

TIA

[Martin Brown]

Begin able to compensate to make a grid of straight lines straight and orthogonal. Most lenses have some barrel or pincushion distortion depending on where in their zoom range they are operating.

There is usually a golden optimum where most distortions cancel out towards but not actually at the long focal length end.

Yes, but it probably doesn't matter if you aren't looking for use as a movie projector. It is never going to work in bright sunlight and so long as you can see the lines to trace it shouldn't matter.

Some PC specific ones might but most are designed to work one way up.

I haven't seen one that wouldn't play anything from basic SD TV resolution through 720p to 1080p and with the option to force aspect ratio with crop or letterbox view. In fact we tricked a 1080p projector with a DVD playing in HD 720p format into working at a much longer throw so that it didn't interpolate pixels up damaging text quality.

Enormously. In general the further from the screen the projector is the closer to ideal paraxial rays the image projection becomes. Conversely the closer to the screen you put it the more essential it is to have everything dead square on centre line and a very well behaved lens.

I reckon you need keystone correction on the vertical axis unless you have a very tall projector stand. Keystone correction horizontally is also available but I think is more of a feature than a benefit.

A PC can produce any test patterns you like or you could manually superimpose a grid on the image you want to project.

[John Rumm]

Yup basically.

Not usually - but you can level the projector, and most will offer some level of "keystone" adjustment (basically correcting the parallelogram distortion arising from off axis projection.

You may get some. They will normally also allow letterboxing for non native ratios.

The amount of keystone correction can vary - so some will allow you to have larger look to the side or up/down offsets and still get you an image with square corners.

Some keystone correction should be a feature of most of them.

Never tried one of the "art" ones so can't really comment. I can see that being able to have it off axis enough to get your shadow out of the way could be very useful though.

[dennis]

If you can afford one of the ultra short throw projectors that uses a large mirror then they don't cast deep shadows when you put something in front of them.

[Richard Treen]

Thanks for all the advice. I'll see hoqw much of it can be applied to models in my affordable price range.

[RayL12]

Though it's very early tech at the moment, look into SprayPrinter. This method, from phone to wall, is the future.

Ray.