I’ve been looking around for a projector that will allow us to play old school games as well as new. This looks to do the trick and seems newer and brighter than the older one we’re currently using. Can anyone offer a first hand account of using this thing or have an alternative recommendation?
Without knowing more, I’ll only address a few items:
Resolution
This projector only supports up to 800x600, which is not even (1280x) 720p HD. That falls significantly short of the more common (1980x) 1080p FHD, or the more recent (3840x) 2160p UHD (4K)… Depending on your needs, this may still be completely fine for some older games, whether they’re coming from an emulated system (like I would do with a Raspberry Pi single board computer), or some other means - Running old NES, SNES, PS1, or N64 games could likely come out looking pretty decent. However, it will not match the expected output that most modern consoles would be able to do. And many of those consoles will not be able to correctly scale down to this.
Latency
I have planned and built several dozen custom home theatres for all types of situations, and with all sorts of clients. Some want to be able to game, and others prefer to game elsewhere, perhaps on a computer monitor or other TV. But the biggest issue with most projectors is that they simply are not the best way to game, ever… Some of the newest projectors from roughly the last 5-10 years will have less latency, or lag, but it will generally be much slower than modern TVs. But you also have to look specifically for gaming-centric projectors, which may cost more, of be less capable at cinematic reproduction. And latency, I would argue, is almost more important than resolution - If the picture is pretty, but the delay between button presses and what you perceive on screen is too much, then the gaming experience will be horrendous, and potentially bad enough to cause motion sickness for some people.
I would vote no on just a generic projector for gaming - Look for something specific if that is your primary use case.
Other Video Features
While projectors can help create a strong sense of immersion with a large, cinematic picture, they tend to be built around that - Just a fixed refresh rate presentation (24Hz for film/movies, 30Hz for most TV shows or soap operas, and 60Hz for some TV content or sports). Gaming has progressively grown to expect lower latency, and higher refresh rates. Sometimes even variable refresh, which can be achieved with HDMI’s own VRR (variable refresh rate) protocol, or more specific versions like AMD’s FreeSync, and Nvidia GSync. These allow a TV or monitor to display games as they are rendered, rather than at a perfectly fixed pace, which may lead to tearing of frames, where the image is marred with horizontal lines between images as they aren’t quite in sync with the display. The problem is that virtually no projectors do this variable refresh, and very few do higher frame rates at all. This also leads to a vote that you pick something a little more intentionally.
TL/DR
Not recommended for gaming due to the following:
- Resolution would be too low for anything newer than a PS2 / XB1 / GameCube
- Latency on a general purpose projector like this would almost certainly make things hard to control
- No support for any of the gaming features that are currently in use for higher end consoles and PCs, like high refresh, variable refresh, HDR, etc.
This may be “sufficient” for basic retro gaming, but even for that purpose, I would take a modern budget TV every single day of the week, just because the ability to handle motion and refresh rate syncing would be SO much better.
I genuinely hope that this helps - Not trying to say that you can’t try this and possibly enjoy it. And there are some people who do just fine with gaming on some projectors. But it’s not something that I’d recommend, personally, as a display calibrator, and a gamer.
Cheers
That makes sense. Thanks for the information!
One other thing, if you please. What about the projectors that tout themselves as being gaming projectors? I see plenty of those, but either they don’t have rca component inputs or they don’t say either way. I see there is another on woot at the moment, a viewSonic that has both and sounds impressive, although I really don’t know enough about this stuff to know for sure, and I can’t find anything about latency. I suppose I could get a second projector and keep the current one around specifically for the older stuff, but I was hoping to be able to keep it all together.
Glad to help where I can 
The newer models of projector often skip the component/composite inputs, since they’re so infrequently used these days, they take up space, and adding hardware to process older, analog style video is part of what adds to latency. Using only digital inputs, which often require little, or no processing, keeps things somewhat faster. Most manufacturers will avoid sharing latency numbers just because they don’t want to be compared to monitors/TVs for gaming, and because that is why in cinemas and home theaters they have AV sync options for sound to be matched back up. If a projector model is said to be good for gaming, chances are definitely better that it won’t be as bad as others. But no guarantee until you try it, and can tell if it’s good enough for your sensitivity and preference.
But there are adapters out there which can accept RCA inputs and then output to HDMI. Granted, they vary a lot in price and function. Some are very cheap ones, which may seem a bit blurry since they’re coming at a low price, and minimal “smarts” to how they convert analog to digital video. Or there are extremely nice ones, like this thing, or the Retro Tink line (I do not own, but I have been extremely impressed with the 4K and 5X models), which can accept several different inputs like SCART, and then they do more clever upscaling (nearest neighbor, or similar), which can help keep the pixels looking more sharp, and less like a stretched jpeg image.
Again, hope that helps clarify.