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| Nick Didlick teaches Nikon School |
Here's a question that I recently received from one of our students attending a seminar in Chicago. It is the type of question that I am often asked so I wanted to share my answer with you.
Question:
What should I look for in digital projectors? What type of projector, LCD or
other? Do I need a lap top computer and a software program like Power Point? How do I go about preparing a digital travel show? The largest audience I usually show to is about 100 people.
Answer:
Three things I always tell people to look for:
- Get one that has a resolution of 1024 X 768. Less expensive models only offer 800 X 600, but you'll be happier with more resolution.
- Look for a high contrast ratio. That's important for projecting photos.
Reject anything under about 600:1. From there on up you'll be happy.
- Lumens simply means brighter, so the larger room you'll be showing in,
the more power you'll want. For 100 people, I'd look for one that's around
2000 (1800 would be okay), but anything much lower will look dim.
As far as doing the show itself, a couple of things:
- Resample your images to fit the resolution of your screen. So use your
editing software (Elements, Photoshop, whatever) to crop them down to a
maximum width of 1024 or a max height of 768. That way they'll fit your
projector perfectly and be nice small files. You can save them as JPEGs at a
medium level (5 or 6 with Photoshop).
- Add a little sharpening to them, to give them a bit more "pop" onscreen.
Just use Filter - Sharpen - Sharpen. That should be plenty.
- For software to show them, you could use Powerpoint, but that's a bit more
work than I'd care to do. Just use a browser's slideshow function (Nikon
View, Picture Project, Photo Mechanic all have good ones). You can even
create title slides by making a new document in Photoshop, size 1024 X 768,
and then putting whatever you want on it.
