projector, image sizes, strategies

[John Chardine]

I seek advice from this august group.

I am a speaker in an upcoming photo workshop and will be faced with prepping the Keynote (Powerpoint) presentation before I know what projector will be used. The problem is that without knowing the projector, I don't know the resolution, and therefore I don't know how big to make the slides and how to prepare the images. Put another way, in an ideal world you should prep images to the native resolution of the projector, but I may not know that ahead of time.

In the "old days", I usually assumed a 1024 x 768 px resolution, resampled image to that and loaded the images into the presentation. However, many projectors today have higher resolutions, which would make a 1024 x 768 image look quite small on the screen, and you certainly don't want the projector to upsample. If I make the images bigger than most resolutions, say 2046 x 1536, then the projector will have to downsample to its resolution. Do they do a good job? Are there problems with this approach? Should I worry so much? Would the option of prepping images to 1080p resolution (1920 x 1080) be a good strategy.

I would be very grateful for anyones experience on this issue.

[DickLudwig]

Our photo club uses a Canon SX800 projector. It doesn't matter what resolution the images are as it adjusts them on the fly to fill the screen just as long as the file is large enough to display a full size image. I believe the same is true for many of today's better/newer projectors. Doesn't help you much until you find out if the projector is fairly new i.e. the last 3 years or so.

[arash_hazeghi]

If the projector is attached to laptop/PC the image is scaled automatically by video driver to match projector native resolution not the projector itself. Projector uses DLP so the images are not super sharp and they are viewed form a good distance so I don't think the photo resolution really matters much. most projectors today are 720p. There are some movie/premium ones that do 1080p but I rarely see them...