You can make almost any projector work in a golf simulator but there is a specific subset of features that you’ll want to target for the best overall experience, and the goal of this video is to help you get the most for your money by understanding which projector specs are important for your sim and which ones you can mostly ignore.
I’ve got six of the most popular golf simulator projectors on the market ranging from $500 to $10,000 so I can show you the differences in brightness, clarity, and ease of use at each price point, and I’m also going to cover some important tips and tricks for getting your projector set up properly.
Throw Ratio, Zoom, and Lens Shift
First, the most important thing is being able to mount your projector somewhere that it not only fills the whole screen, but also doesn’t cast shadows and isn’t in danger of getting hit by a club or a ball. For that we need to talk a little bit about throw ratio, optical zoom, and lens shift.
Most golf sim specific projectors are classified as short throw, meaning they can project a large screen from a relatively small distance and the ratio of the distance from lens to screen divided by the width of the projected image is called the throw ratio.
The projectors in this video have throw ratios ranging from a very short fixed throw at 0.56:1 on the Optoma ZK608TST to a fixed 1:1 ratio on the Epson EF12, while the rest of the projectors give a bit of flexibility with optical zoom, with the BENQ LK936ST coming in with the least zoom at 1.1x, the Epson L1100U has around 1.18x, and the BENQ TK710STi and BENQ AH700ST have a 1.2x zoom.
Depending on the height of your ceiling, your ideal projector mounting location will range from directly above the hitting area to a few feet back since your club path shouldn’t pass directly above the ball, which keeps your projector out of harm’s way but also projects at a steep enough angle that you won’t cast shadows onto your screen while swinging. You can see that in my sim space, the 1:1 throw ratio of the Epson EF12 was slightly too long, resulting in my entire body casting a shadow during my follow through, while the BENQ LK936ST and Epson L1100U had some club shadows and the very short throw of the Optoma ZK608TST meant there weren’t any shadows at all.
To find which throw ratio is right for your space you’ll want to measure the distance from your hitting area to your screen and also the height of your screen Then use a screen calculator tool to figure out the width of your projector’s image based on the height. If you are looking at a projector with a 1080p or 4K resolution you should select 16:9 as the aspect ratio, but if you’re looking at a WXGA or WUXGA resolution projector the aspect ratio will be 16:10. Divide the distance from your ball to screen by your screen width to determine your ideal throw ratio. Calculating the throw ratio this way will make sure that you can fill the entire screen by letting the projected image overflow off the left and right sides and then I’ll show how to create a custom resolution later on so that you can fit your screen perfectly.
If your projector has optical zoom, you get a little bit of flexibility in placement but usually not more than 12 inches or so, while fixed throw projectors like the Epson EF12 and Optoma ZK608TST have digital zoom and image shift options to help you fit to your screen even with less than perfect throw distance.
Another gotcha when mounting your projector is you may be tempted to put your projector mount directly centered in the middle of your screen, but most projectors have the lens offset to the left or right of the projector body, so if you put the mount in the center then the lens won’t be lined up properly with the screen.
And that’s where lens shift and digital image shift come into play since they give you some flexibility in placement with basically zero image degradation. And depending on the specific projector, the amount of lens shift and zoom can vary from being able to correct small mounting position errors like the BENQ LK936ST and Optoma ZK608TST, to giving you complete control of where you want your projector mounted like the Epson L1100U with the optional short throw lens that has over 80” of side to side adjustment.
In addition to some optical lens shift, the Optoma ZK608TST also has digital shift allowing you to move the image left and right within the 16:9 aspect ratio, which also works well and doesn’t result in degradation as long as you’ve mounted it the correct distance to fill your screen vertically.
So to summarize, make sure you get a projector with the correct throw ratio to fill the entire height of your screen from the distance you have available, know that the further back you mount your projector the more shadows will be cast on your screen, and if you can afford it look for features like optical zoom and lens shift which make it significantly easier to get your projector mounted perfectly.
Brightness Testing
Next, let’s talk about brightness and contrast. Projector brightness, usually given in lumens (lm), is much more important for a simulator than it is for a home theater but unlike for a home theater projector, the listed contrast ratio of your projector basically isn’t important at all. Contrast ratios are calculated by measuring the brightness of an all-white screen and then comparing that to the brightness of an all-black screen, which is often called the projector’s “black floor.”
At the high end of home theater projectors, you can spend thousands of dollars just to shave off a few tenths of a lux from your projector’s black floor, but in a golf simulator you’re going to need at least some light on in the room to see the ball. Even a small amount of ambient light will drown out the native black floor of most projectors, meaning the real important numbers when determining contrast are the ambient light in the room and the projector’s peak brightness.
In this video, the projectors have advertised peak brightnesses ranging from 1000lm on the $500 Epson EF12 to 6000lm on the $8500 Epson L1100U and $6000 Optoma ZK608TST. While I found that all the projectors could come very close to their advertised brightness, most could only do it in a specific “Bright” mode that sacrificed color accuracy, shifted the entire image towards the green spectrum, and wasn’t something that anyone would realistically want to use.
Here are all the peak brightness values and there corresponding color accuracy measured with Calman Ultimate where lower numbers are better, and you can see specifically the BENQ TK710STi and BENQ AH700ST were not usable in their “Bright” mode while the BENQ LK936ST, Optoma ZK608TST, Epson L1100U, and Epson EF12 were not terrible, but I still thought there were better image mode options and here are those measurements.
When it comes to brightness, all the projectors were usable but brighter is definitely better and here are all the projectors side by side filmed with the exact same settings on my Sony A7 IV camera, first with all the lights off,
next with my normal amount of sim lighting,
then with half the lights on in my garage,
and last with all the lights on.
You can see that if you don’t mind playing in a darker room, you can get away with a dimmer and cheaper projector, and at a certain amount of ambient light even the brightest projectors look washed out on a white screen.
By the way if you’re interested my DIY golf tech projects like my floor replay screen, pushcart mounted launch monitor, and my upcoming faux skylight build for my sim, I’d love it if you would subscribe to my 2nd channel “The Hook Up Extras,” also linked below.
Resolution (4K, 1080p, WUXGA)
Moving on to another big price differentiator, resolution, which actually doesn’t have as large of an impact on performance as you’d expect. Golf sim projectors generally come in four different resolutions: WXGA, 1080p, WUXGA, and 4K.
In each resolution the first number represents how many pixels wide the screen is, and the second number is how many pixels tall it is and if your impact screen is a standard aspect ratio like 16:9 or 16:10, then you get to use all the pixels, but as I mentioned before, most people end up with odd size screens in their simulator to maximize the room space.
My screen for instance is 100” tall and 107” wide, so to figure out how many pixels I can use from a 4K projector I need to divide my screen width, which is 107”, by my screen height, which is 100”, which gives me a ratio of 1.07. Then I multiply that by the number vertical pixels for my projector’s resolution. For instance, a 4K resolution has 2160 vertical pixels so the ideal resolution to fit my screen is 2311 pixels wide by 2160 pixels tall which is about 4.99 megapixels total. To project this resolution, I can go into my NVidia control panel, select my projector, click customize, and then create a custom resolution which is then available when I start GSPro and fills the screen perfectly without any aspect ratio distortion.
For a WUXGA projector my resolution would be 1284 x 1200 or 1.54 megapixels total. For 1080p it would be 1155 x 1080 or 1.24 megapixels. And for a WXGA projector it would be 856 x 800 or 0.68 megapixels, which is probably too low.
The more pixels you have, the clearer your image will be. But at the same time, you shouldn’t expect a home theater quality image regardless of the resolution considering you’re projecting onto a textured impact screen with less than perfect tension that you’re going to hit golf balls at going over 150 miles an hour.
And here’s what the text looks like in the GSPro driving range for each of those resolutions.
You can see that of the 4K projectors running at 2311 x 2160 the BENQ TK710STi has the clearest text due to its 0.65” DLP chip, followed by the Optoma ZK608TST, and then the BENQ LK936ST. The Epson L1100U is a WUXGA native projector so I was running it at 1284 x 1200, but its issue wasn’t with resolution, but with panel alignment and you can see that even though the text is crisp, each letter has a halo of blue on one side and green on the other that I was not able to correct with Epson’s panel alignment features.
The BENQ AH700ST is a 1080p native projector but has a neat trick up its sleeve. Not only does it have an automatic screen fit feature that uses a camera mounted on the front of the projector to digitally adjust image size, but it can also change its display ID to tell your computer that it has different native aspect ratios like 1:1, 4:3, 16:9, and 16:10, which works well if your screen is one of those standard sizes and cuts out the need to set a custom resolution on your computer but for my unique screen you can see it caused some stretching issues and squished the text boxes horizontally. But to be fair, I thought they still looked pretty clear for 1080p resolution, especially when compared to the 1080p of the Epson EF12 which was easily the worst and didn’t even look like true 1080p to me.
So much like brightness, more resolution is better, but between 4K, WUXGA, and 1080p, there wasn’t a huge difference in clarity. The other thing I didn’t mention is that running simulator software like GSPro in 4K requires a much more powerful computer than running the same graphics quality at 1080p, so if you’re planning on using 4K you not only need to budget for a higher priced projector, but also a higher end gaming PC and graphics card.
DLP vs 3LCD Projection
Next let’s talk about projection technologies. All the projectors in this video happen to have single laser light sources, which means they use an array of single color laser diodes combined with a laser phosphor wheel instead of using a traditional bulb and color wheel like you would find in most older projectors. The advantage of a laser over a bulb is that the light source will last the entire effective lifespan of the projector and should maintain 50% of its original brightness for at least 20,000 hours of usage.
The other major technological difference is in the projector’s imager, and the Optoma and BENQ projectors use DLP technology. DLP projectors make an image by loading a single frame into their memory, and then breaking it up into red, green, and blue sub-frames. It the aligns each pixel mirror on its digital micromirror chip to correspond with the red subframe then flashes the red LEDs, then it does the same for green, and then blue, and because our eyes have something called persistence of vision our brains can then combine the three subframes into a full color image.
Epson projectors on the other hand use 3LCD projection technology where they take a full color frame and break it down into red, green, and blue subframes that it then displays on three black and white LCD screens. It shines red light through one screen, green through another, and blue through the third and then those three light beams are then recombined and all projected onto the screen at the same time. So, if you’re using a high framerate camera like the ones in launch monitors and swing cameras, a projected DLP screen may flash and have rainbow artifacts while a 3LCD screen will not.
Here’s a side by side of how the Carl’s Place swing cameras paired with Uneekor VIEW software capture each of the projectors, and you can see that at 120 frames per second there isn’t any significant banding or rainbow artifacts but turning the framerate up to 300 frames per second causes the DLP image to flicker and color band while the 3LCD images from the Epson L1100U and EF12 are completely stable.
And here’s the same comparison using the Rapsodo MLM2Pro launch monitor which has both color and infrared cameras, and you can see that the overview camera is significantly affected by the strobing of the DLP screens, while the Epson projectors are much more clear and the image from the L1100U is basically perfect. However, it’s worth noting that the overview replay camera has no effect on ball data and the actual impact camera is infrared only and can’t see the screens at all.
Last, I’m going to rapid fire through a few other features that may or may not be important to you based on how you’re going to use your simulator.
Dust Resistance
First, dust resistance. If you’re in a multipurpose space like a garage or basement, the Optoma ZK608TST is IP6X dust proof, the BENQ LK936ST and BENQ AH700ST are IP5X dust proof, and while I couldn’t find any official ingress protection ratings on the Epson L1100U, large venue projectors are generally built to withstand abuse, and it should be more than fine in a garage or basement space.
Power Draw
I also measured the power draw on each projector’s maximum brightness setting and found that the BENQ LK936ST had the highest power draw at 400W, followed by the Epson L1100U at 380W and the Optoma ZK608TST at 364W while the rest of the projectors were under 200W of power draw.
Fan Noise
The BENQ LK936ST was also the loudest projector at around 53.6 decibels while most of the other projectors were around 47 decibels and the Epson EF12 was especially quiet at just 43.4 decibels.
Size and Weight
The biggest drawback of the Epson L1100U is its size and weight, and you can see that next to a normal size projector like the BENQ TK710Sti, the L1100U is over twice as large in every dimension and weighs nearly 50 pounds compared to the TK710STi which is just under 7lbs. The Optoma ZK608TST and BENQ LK936ST are slightly larger than typical home theater projectors, but still very reasonable and easy to handle.
Input Lag
Input lag has no effect on golf simulators because the launch monitors themselves will have orders of magnitude more lag than the projector, but if you want to use your projector to play video games as well, then the Optoma ZK608TST and BENQ TK710STi have the lowest input lag possible of 16.8ms for 4K and 1080p at 60Hz, 8.9ms for 1080p at 120Hz and 4.3ms at 240Hz, while the Epson L1100U is usable with 27.1ms of input lag at 1080p60Hz but can’t display 4K60Hz, and the BENQ LK936ST and AH700ST both had around 33ms at both 1080p60Hz and 4k60Hz which is also fine for most casual gaming, while the Epson EF12 was the only one that can’t really be used for video games with over 100ms of input lag on both 1080p and 4K signals.
Contrast Testing
Speaking of multi-use spaces, I mentioned that contrast ratios weren’t important when using your projector in a simulator, but if you wanted to use your projector to watch movies in a darkened room I did measure the native contrast of each projector using Calman Ultimate and was thoroughly impressed with the Optoma ZK608TST which had a 2231:1 contrast ratio without dynamic dimming, and the BENQ TK710STi had the lowest black floor of 0.108 nits giving it a native contrast ratio of 1738:1.
Conclusions and Recommendations
So, in conclusion, all things considered, the new Optoma ZK608TST is the best all-around golf sim projector money can buy. It’s got 5879lm of peak brightness in “Bright” mode with less than ideal but still usable color accuracy, and 4600lm in “Vivid” mode with vibrant and accurate colors. It has one of the shortest throw distances I’ve ever seen as well as optical lens shift and digital image shift. It’s quiet, dust proof, has a relatively low power draw for its brightness, a very high native contrast ratio, supports HDR content and 3D, has low input lag, and it’s just barely larger than a typical home theater projector. The only downsides I can see are that it doesn’t have any optical zoom and at $5999 it’s not going to fit most people’s budget.
The BENQ TK710STi is also a great all-around projector for a third of the price at $1999, but it also has half the usable brightness and while I was actually able to measure higher than BENQ’s claimed 3200lm in “Bright” mode, it wasn’t particularly usable, and “Living Room” mode gave the next highest brightness at 2448lm while maintaining accurate colors. Like the Optoma, the BENQ TK710STi is a particularly good option for someone looking for a multipurpose projector since it has good contrast, low input lag, and supports HDR and 3D formats. You’ll just need to keep the lights in your sim a little dimmer.
I’ve been using the BENQ LK936ST in my simulator for the last 9 months and playing around 10 hours a week. I’ve had absolutely no problems with it, but I’ll be switching to the Epson L1100U after this video. Not only is it quieter and brighter with less power draw but since my sim is only set up for right handed players, I plan to use the Epson’s massive lens shift to offset it even further away from the hitting area, and the 3LCD technology looks much better on camera which is nice for both swing cameras and webcam streaming for online matches. The other thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that even though the MSRP on a projector like the L1100U is $8500, it’s mostly designed for auditoriums and large conference rooms and as businesses upgrade you can get crazy deals on them used. I snagged this one on eBay for $1200 and it only had 1283 hours on it, which is an absolutely crazy value if you can use the stock lens with a 1.4 throw ratio, but less of a deal if you have to buy the separate $3500 short throw lens.
The 1080p BENQ AH700ST is an innovative idea with its auto screen fit and adjustable EDID resolutions, but I was disappointed to see that the 4000lm of peak brightness were only available in “Bright” mode with unusable color accuracy and that the “Golf” specific image mode was just 2200lm. So while the 1080p resolution may have been forgivable on a true 4000lm projector, I think you’d have to be crazy to not spend the extra $100 on the 4K TK710STi over the AH700ST especially considering the TK710STi has higher brightness in its color accurate modes.
And as for the Epson EF12, it is what it is. If your budget is $500 and you want a very usable short throw projector that’s easy to set up, has a long lasting laser light source, is super small, has low power draw, great speakers, and good digital zoom image shift options, the EF12 works. But don’t expect much wow factor and be prepared to play with most of your lights off.
As always there are no sponsored reviews on this channel, but I do have links for all the projectors below and I appreciate it when you use those links since as an Amazon Affiliate I do earn a small commission on the sale at no cost to you.
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