What Projector is best for a Sports Bar? - BenQ or Epson

If you are looking to upgrade the experience of your sports bar, consider the impact of watching a game on a 12-foot-wide screen. But with a typical 98-inch commercial TV weighing 200 pounds and costing nearly $7000, the latest new laser and LED projectors can produce amazing huge images – with a lot less hassle. What should you look for in a modern sports bar projector? Here are some key criteria

For a practical sports bar viewing experience, you will want a bright projector to avoid it looking “washed out” when the lights are on. A 4000-lumen projector is a good starting point that is easy to find. Remember, the bigger the screen, the brighter the projector.

A typical Buffalo Wild Wings or Twin Peaks sports bar will run a projector for over 14 hours per day. But most projector buyers don’t know that most traditional LCD projectors can’t handle this type of use and it will void the warranty. In addition, many projectors need to have their filters cleaned as often as every month. That’s a lot of work compared to a TV.

Today, you can get a DLP projector that is certified for 24/7 use in sports bars – and is sealed so you don’t have to clean it or worry about dust. And it has a three-year warranty since it uses the same proven technology used in a commercial movie theater. The best part – it doesn’t cost any more than a traditional projector with filters.

Depending on your TV provider, most sports bars will want to use 1080p resolution or 4K UHD. For example, most of DirecTV channels are broadcast in 1080i or 720p, but certain NFL channels now support 4K UHD with 8.3 million pixels. Thes are ideal for projectors as a bigger screen will help your viewers see the details such as scoreboard tickers they might miss on a regular TV.

The other big consideration for a sports bar projector is color accuracy. Why? Many teams have similar colors, so you need a projector that shows them accurately for a good viewing experience. Consider the tiny difference between the Aaron Rodgers shirt for the Packers, and his new one with the Jets. Or the different colors of red when the St. Louis Cardinals play the Cincinnati Reds. Fans care.

Look for a projector with over 92% Rec. 709 coverage to ensure you get a projector that can reproduce the right color on helmets, jerseys, and grass – rather than a generic education projector designed for basic charts and graphs.

Higher brightness projectors powered by mercury lamps are fast becoming extinct. Besides being expensive, they will get harder to find in the future due to environmental regulations. The two alternatives are LED projectors and laser projectors. For example the new LH730 projector has 24/7 capability and can last up to 30,000 hours – which is about six years use in a typical sports bar. By contrast, some 1080p projectors using lamps need to be replaced after just 15 months of use in the same scenario.

HDR10 is the modern standard in video content. HDR10 was released in 2015 and most sports channels and streaming services now offer support for HDR10 content. In the past, only home theater projectors supported HDR, but today there are excellent options for 4000 and 5000-lumen projectors that use HDR10 to drastically improve the color range of the displayed video.

If you want to use a projector to create a dramatic viewing area that will pull in customers to your sports bar, we can help you. Just click here – or give us a call at 888-818-5888 to talk to one of our sports bar projector experts to help you work out all the details for your space.