April 19, 2004

Hi folks,

As you may have already noticed, we have completed an overhaul of the Top 10 list to make it more relevant to all of our readers. As it was, the popularity of relatively few very inexpensive home theater projectors was causing the list to be dominated by these units. Thus nobody could tell what the most popular high performance home theater machines might be, or which models are currently hot for portable presentation use, school classrooms, etc.

Therefore we have broken the Top 10 into several specific categories. The Home Theater Top 10 is broken into the five most popular low budget models, and the top five high performance units. We have added a Top 10 for Education, which includes the five hottest selling low budget SVGA resolution units, and the five best selling inexpensive XGA models. For business portables it was necessary to produce four lists, so this became the Top 20 Portable Projectors. This list consists of the Top 10 under 5 lbs., and the Top 10 in the very hot 5 lb. to 7 lb. weight category. Within each of those lists there are five SVGA and five XGA models.

We hope this update to the Top 10 format will help all readers to quickly identify the best selling models that are most suited to their needs. We expect to add a fourth Top Ten category focused on installation projectors within the next week or two.

As far as reviews are concerned the Optoma H30 and the upgraded BenQ PE8700 are both in the lab at this time. We hope to get the H30 posted this week.

We are continuing to work on the screen review. We have received quite a few emails from folks presenting their own DIY paint solutions, some of which are quite original. One reader reported success using a very light red paint (actually white with a subtle reddish tint) to counteract the excess green light from his projector. For him this eliminated the need to use a color-correcting filter, and thus there was no sacrifice of lumen output from the projector that such a filter requires. Interesting idea. We might try that one ourselves.

Thanks for using ProjectorCentral,

Evan Powell