Projector Buyer’s Guide 2.0 (For Hologram Making)

The main traits of a projector when it comes to making holograms are as follows:

• Brightness

• Focusability

• Size

I bought 6 projectors to test and see which types would make the best use for holograms.

Brightness

1. The darker the room, the less lumens (measurement for brightness on projectors) that you need.
2. In a fully dark room, you need very few lumens (as low as 15 can work), in a bright room you would want closer to 4500 lumens.
3. The more lumens, the brighter it will be in your eyes when you look at it from certain angles. So brighter is not always better.
4. In general you’ll still want a low-lit room regardless of which projector you use.

Focusability

1. It is essential that your projector has a manual focus.  There are projectors on the market that auto focus or laser projectors.  They will not work well with a hologram (because they do not see the particles as an object to focus on).

Size

1. A regular home-theater projector is ok if your hologram is scaled to that size, but for a default hologram a mini projector will do the trick just fine.  They are much easier to test with and carry around as many have batteries and SD cards for increased mobility.

3 examples of good choices are (I have purchased all 3 of these)

3M Pocket Projector (the one listed in the parts list for the default hologram system)

• Very portable, comes with mini SD card, can hook up to many electronic devices, incredibly cheap
• Easy to adjust focus right on the front

AAXA Micro Projector

• Not quite as portable as the 3M above, but a fair amount more powerful (75 lumens instead of 15)
• Same easy adjust focusing
• Only slightly more expensive than the 3M projector

4500 Lumen Home Entertainment Projector (also doubles as a home entertainment projector)

• The exact model I used is Hitachi CP-X1250 LCD Home Theater Projector 4500 Lumen (ensure it has manual focus)
• You can use it a less dark environment
• Also good for making much larger holograms
• Very bright if you look into it, be aware