Digital projectors UK: the best home projectors 2022 for all budgets, from Anker, Philips, and Puppy
Digital projectors are emerging as a popular alternative to traditional tellies for watching media at home. Here are our favourite on the market.
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Modern digital projectors are something of a revelation to use. Similar to the projectors at your local cinema, only smaller, simpler and thus more suitable for home use, they’re remarkably easy to install and move.
Thanks to improvements in the performance and affordability of projectors in recent years, these devices are emerging as a popular alternative to traditional tellies for watching media at home.
Why a projector, rather than a TV?
For anyone who spends any length of time watching films, TV, sports, or playing video games, the addition of a digital projector to your household is truly transformative. We've had one for a decade, and still find it breath-taking to take in a viewing of The Shining in a screen as wide as our lounge wall, from our own sofa, with no irritating strangers munching on popcorn behind us.
Mass Effect is an altogether more immersive experience when the players are the same size as you. You may find flat-screen TVs impressive – but watching Game of Thrones on a screen seven feet wide and four foot high leaves even big screens in the dust.
We all know we spend too much of our lives staring as screens, and you may think that an addition of a digital projector to your life will only compound this. But the light is quite different. Rather than light shining directly at you, you're seeing it reflected off the surface you're viewing, causes considerably less eye-strain.
Provided you get the specs right, a digital projector will result in a smoother, more 'cinematic' image for viewing than a TV. You know that slightly synthetic, overly bright quality some HD TV has? Projectors bring a depth of image without tipping over into the 'hyper-real'
The portability of a projector is a serious boon. We've taken projectors away on holidays to set up so our travel-mates can play PlayStation, while a big-screen TV doesn't have the same flexibility.
Our favourite digital projectors for 2022
As with all technology, the opportunity to spend up large is certainly there, but we've opted for a selection here that's on the lower end of the cost spectrum, to reflect what people usually spend on in-house entertainment (save for our last choice, which is our pick of the high-end options). Nevertheless, the performance of these projectors is seriously impressive.