Optional Lenses for Large Venue Projectors

When designers and visual artists imagine works that involve spaces where the audience not only experiences their designs but also engages with it in a meaningful way, they tend to think with a boundless energy that sees no limits to what they can conceive. Whether it be an interactive exhibit or a large-scale business presentation, many of these designs rely on the use of large-venue projectors to produce the images that are the crux of their designs.

Large venue projectors are commercial projectors geared towards use in large venues such as exhibit halls, auditoriums, and public spaces, as opposed to the consumer projectors used in home theaters and small meeting rooms. Because of their nature, large venue projectors tend to have top-end specifications with very high brightness values (with a range of up to 30,000 ANSI lumens or more), and more importantly they feature the use of optional lenses.

Unlike normal consumer projectors, large venue projectors do not feature built-in lenses, instead large venue projectors feature compartments that allow you to install separate interchangeable lenses, or “optional lenses”, lenses whose specifications, particularly throw ratio and lens shift, can vary.

In this scenario a speaker is making a presentation to a large audience, as seen in the image below. Regardless of whether the site is custom-designed or a pre-existing space, this is a scenario where the projector needed for the presentation can only be installed in a certain location while the screen used for the projection is a defined size. This then sets limits on both the projection distance and the screen width, or in other words the throw ratio. Similarly, the projector’s projection angle will entirely depend on things like the position of the speaker and whether or not a stage is present.

If you imagine using a projector with a built-in lens in this type of scenario, the system integrator would have to procure a projector with a throw ratio and lens shift capability that matches the conditions of the presentation for each and every setting. By using a large venue projector with optional lenses instead, the system integrator can just switch to a lens with matching specs depending on the situation.

In this scenario an image is projected across a wall whose nature requires multiple projectors each projector projecting sections of the image to form a whole. Furthermore, in order to ensure that things like the color, contrast, and sharpness of each projected image are in sync so that each section blends seamlessly into the other, each projector must be of the same model.

With this setup each projector must be placed at different heights/positions to avoid a projector obstructing the image from another projector. This then varies the projection distance and angle for each projector, which would then require that each projector feature different throw ratios and lens shifting capabilities. Given that in this type of setup each projector is of the same model, as explained above, fulfilling this requirement is something which only optional lenses can do.

Understanding that only optional lenses make it possible for large venue projectors to perfectly execute a designer’s vision, what makes BenQ’s optional lenses the ideal solution for your projection needs