It recently dawned on me that I could plug my Nintendo Switch into my projector. By that point in the pandemic, after what felt like an eternity since cinemas had closed, I’d already fulfilled my dream of installing a movie theater in my bedroom. My partner was hogging the living room, deep in a session of Quiplash with her friends on Zoom, but I needed to finish my review of Super Mario 3D Land. Twenty minutes of unknotting and rerouting HDMI cords later, Mario was bursting across the 80-inch screen in my bedroom, about as close to life-sized as I think he’ll ever be in my own home. This, I remember thinking, is the only way to play video games.
My goal for my home theater project was to prove that you don’t need an entire Bitcoin (currently valued at $46,040) to get a worthwhile projector. It’s tricky, though. Projectors are different from TVs. You have to bring into consideration mount placement, screen size, the lighting in your room, and the kind of entertainment you’ll be enjoying. Cheap projectors are loud. Some projectors sit right in front of the screen, while others need to be meticulously affixed to ceilings or walls at a precise distance that you really can’t mess up. And when you add gaming into the mix, things get even hairier.
For a projector to even work with a game console, it needs to have an extremely low latency, also known as input lag. That’s the amount of time the projector takes to react to a video signal and produce a picture on the screen. Especially if you’re playing something fast-paced like a fighting game, you need that amount of time to be low. Like, so low it’s almost impossible to detect. Put it like this: If Chun Li is about to kick you in the jaw in Street Fighter and you press the back button to block, you better hope the latency is low enough so you actually block in time. Otherwise Zangief is going to end up with a throat full of teeth. Get it?
Projectors, like TVs, can get pricey as hell. And sure, I wanted to list a few expensive options on here for the lucky ones among us who can afford a pixel-perfect lamp. But for the rest of us, I don’t think projector gaming is out of the question. For less than the price of a stimulus check, you can get a more than decent picture, and a gaming experience that will put your 30-inch flatscreen to shame. Until they start making movie theaters just for gaming (when is that going to happen?), these nine home projectors are a great place to start.