You’ve finally sacked-up and decided to take that next step into the home theater Big Boy club; you’ve made the decision to abandon that weak-sauce, girly-man flat panel display and go with a strong-like-bull front projector! First things first...bring it in. We gotta hug this bitch out. Congratulations! For today, you are a man!

So, now that you’ve made this momentous decision you’re probably all, “What the hell? How do I turn this madness into a reality?!”

I got you, bro. (I mean, I’m assuming you’re a dude. But if you’re actually a girl…how you doin’? Let’s hug this out again..) Since I’ve installed dozens of projectors, I’m gonna hold your hand and walk you through the velvet ropes and lead you down the plushy carpeting all the way to the nice seats in front of the big screen of home theater Nirvana.  

Here’s everything you need to know about installing your new front projector!

Screen Size

Whole articles have been written on selecting the screen to use with your projector so I’m not going to go into that here. (If you need a primer on selecting a screen, here’s a good article from my friend, Geoff Morrison, posted on CNET.) Suffice it to say, I’m going to assume that you’ve made the decision on the screen material, gain, aspect ratio, mounting type (fixed or roll-down) and all the other stuff. (For what it’s worth, I have a Draper Access MultiView Series V M1300 motorized screen in dual aspect ratio in my theater. It is 92-inches when 16x9 and 115-inches in 2.35:1. For more on aspect ratios, read my post “Geometry, Aspect Ratios, and Why You Should Love Those Black Bars On Your TV.")

The only thing we’re interested here is the screen size. And by size I mean the width. Not girth. Because the width is going to determine the throw distance and installation location of the projector. For the sake of math simplicity, let’s just assume that you are going to use a screen that has a 100-inch width. (Which would be 115-inches diagonal and 56-inches high for a 16x9 screen for those keeping score at home.)

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