TV or projector for your room?
A projector gives you a wall-sized image; a TV gives you brightness and simplicity. The right answer is mostly about how dark your room gets — and how big you want to go.
TV or projector — how do you decide?
By how dark you can make the room. A projector doesn’t project black — black is just your wall with no light on it, so every bit of ambient light lifts the shadows and flattens the picture. In a room you can make genuinely dark, a projector delivers a cinematic 100"-plus image no TV can match for the money. In a room with windows and daytime use, even a bright projector looks faded, and a TV holds its contrast no matter what the sun does.
When is a projector worth it over a TV?
Beyond about 85 inches. TVs are the better value up to about 85"; past that, prices climb steeply while projection gets a 100–120" image for the cost of a good mid-range TV. A standard projector needs several feet of throw distance and a proper screen; ultra-short-throw models sit inches from the wall but want an ambient-light-rejecting screen to look their best. Either way, budget the screen as part of the system — a bare wall wastes what you paid for the projector. How many feet “several” means depends on the model, and it is checkable before you buy: our projector throw distance table lists the image width every tracked projector fills at each mount distance.
You can have both
Many dedicated rooms run a projector for movie nights and a TV for casual and daytime viewing, and it’s less extravagant than it sounds — a used or entry TV covers daytime duty while the projector does what it’s actually good at. If that’s your plan, pick a receiver with two HDMI outputs so switching between displays is one button, not a cable swap.