When it comes to delivering a high quality lesson, it’s expected that there will be some form of digital resource in use on the front of class projector or display.
You’re trying your best to deliver exciting, engaging lessons for your students. You’ve spent time creating high quality digital resources but you can’t use them today because the sun is too bright or the blinds don’t shut fully.
When you can’t see your content on the screen, the problem isn’t that it’s somehow sunny in England but rather that your classroom projector isn’t bright enough. This can be for a number of reasons.
The most obvious and often overlooked is that the unit never had a high enough output. No amount of light emitted from your projector, measured in Lumens, will overpower the brightness of the sun. This is the largest challenge when specifying classroom projection systems. We want you to have the brightest, clearest image possible; however sometimes, budgets just don’t stretch.
So what’s the problem with my projector?
Something we find regularly is that a projector has lost brightness over time. It’s easy to blame an old lamp for this, but most of the time it’s not the culprit. Modern projectors can run for up to 6000 hours before the lamp requires replacement. In a typical classroom, running your projector from 9am to 3pm, with an hour for break and lunch; it would be over 6 years before the lamp was due for replacement.
For some types of projector, LCD, loosing brightness is an unfortunate part of the aging process. Heat from the lamp damages the liquid crystal display matrix which the light passes through to create an image. No amount of cleaning or replacement lamps will solve this.
The aging process is accelerated when projectors aren’t regularly cleaned and serviced. When we go into a classroom and look at a faulty projector, we can guess the colour of the school uniform by the matching coloured lint trapped in the projector filter. This builds up all day, every day when you have the projector turned on.
“When you can’t see your projector on the screen, the problem isn’t that it’s somehow sunny in England”
To overcome this rapid aging caused by blocked filters, we suggest a regular projector service every 12 months. We clean all of the filters, check the temperatures and re-focus and calibrate the image to ensure that everything is performing as well as possible.
Performing a regular projector service is the best way to extend the lift span of your investment in projection technology.
What if my projector is beyond repair?
Sometimes, even with regular cleaning and maintenance of your systems, your projector reaches the end of it’s life. When this happens, it’s time to think about how you can make the most of the opportunity to re-invest in hardware.
You can replace the projector like for like, or with a brighter model. We retrofit projectors into your existing classroom environment. You could take the opportunity to look into newer ultra-short throw units which project an image with much less glare and shadow on the screen.
The best approach however is to replace your projector and board system with a modern, high brightness, interactive touch display. Using these displays in your classroom environment will transform your use of technology in teaching.
How do I make things better?
We’re here to help you improve things. We come to your site, assess each projector in turn and make recommendations on how best to proceed using our in-depth experience of AV systems. From there, it’s as simple as choosing when you want us to come back and make things better.
