Best Projectors for Golf Simulators and Home Theatre

A significant portion of people interested in setting up an indoor golfing simulator with a projector would also like to use the same space as a home entertainment area. That means movies and TV streaming, and increasingly also gaming with consoles such as PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The overlap between golfers and home theatre aficionados appears considerable. This trend enjoys support from the evolving design of golf simulator projectors, which now share many of the features and core technologies of home entertainment projectors. You can enjoy many forms of entertainment with one swing, so to speak. Here we’ll look at the most important things. Essential specifications to keep in mind include 4K, short throw, high brightness, and colour accuracy.

Since the projector forms the heart of your golf simulator and encompasses your home entertainment centre, this is very important. Short throw is absolutely essential since it allows the projector’s placement where it is needed to fill the screen, outside your swing or hitting area and with no annoying shadows cast on the image. The resolution you want is 4K, obviously, with laser projection tech and high brightness to deliver superb image quality in diverse lighting conditions.

To achieve high brightness in the area of 5000 lumens and above, laser projection has to be present. While costlier, laser projectors provide the benefits of more advanced technology. Not only their colour accuracy is vastly better, but they consume less power, and have instant on/off capability with no warm-up or cooldown. Laser projectors don’t need any specific maintenance, since the light source doesn’t need to be replaced as is the case with lamp-based projectors. That also save you money in the long run. Going back to brightness, lasers age in a very slow and linear way, resulting in consistent brightness and colour over a longer product lifespan. 

Like all simulators, golf sims try to emulate the real world and actual locations and bring the experience to your home. Believable, realistic colours are part and parcel of doing that. Golf courses have so many elements that depend on colour accuracy to look good, from grass and trees, to sand traps and bodies of water and even the sky boxes above. Without colour accuracy all of these pale in comparison to their real world counterparts, and the simulation can’t sell the illusion.

All good and well, but what to look for? Since the most common colour gamut for golf sims, movies, and gaming remains Rec.709, you need a projector that offers at least 90% coverage of this colour space. Please check for this specification, as many projectors labelled as high brightness may have the lumens, but they don’t have the colour accuracy. With 90% Rec.709, not only do your golf sim locales appear realistic and immersive, but movies are depicted as cinematographers and directors planned, while video games (just like your golf sim) also draw you in with vibrant and accurate graphics. 

The right projector means you maximise the potential of your home entertainment space without short-changing any given activity, be it golf simulation, home cinema or console gaming.

The newly-launched BenQ LK936ST+ laser projector, selected for the ProjectorCentral InfoComm 2021 Best of Show Award, is specifically designed and made as a new generation platform for savvy golf sim fans with a wide-reaching interest in other forms of home entertainment. The LK936ST+ delivers 4K laser-driven images with a precision Texas Instruments digital light processing (DLP) module. Brightness is at an eye-popping 5100 lumens with a short throw ratio of 0.81-0.89. For colour accuracy, the LK936ST+ delivers the goods with 92% Rec.709 coverage. And with its exclusive Golf Mode, this projector’s colour and ability to be a high-quality home theatre and gaming solution enables you to create a dual-purpose golf simulator in a single space.