We’re getting a ton of slides in… Most people have moved away from film in favor of LCD projectors, but every so often there’s a conference where they ask you to bring the old, low-tech alternative. There are advantages and drawbacks to each format of course.
LCD Projectors have two huge advantages. First, there’s no film. That means no delays shooting them and having them developed. You can make changes right up to the last minute, and a lot of our cilents do just that…
The second advantage is that you can show motion. There are some things that can only be shown as animation or video footage. Plus, no matter how grainy or jerky it is, video has a huge “Wow! Cool!” factor.
Drawbacks? LCD Projectors are expensive and can be finicky. There’s a lot more that can go wrong with an LCD and, if it’s hardware related, it’s going to be more expensive to fix. But in my opinion the biggest drawback is image quality.
Image quality is where film stomps all over LCD. Most video projectors top out at around 1024 x 768 pixel resolution. Our film recorder can produce an image with 8192 x 5461 pixel resolution. So each image on film will have 64 times as much information as an image from a computer. If you’re projecting on a twenty foot lecture hall screen, you’ll really notice the difference. The LCD projector will be building a picture out of dots the size of a pencil eraser, while the dots on a slide will be less than the width of the lead.