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. Whether 85" is already enough from your couch is checkable: the TV size calculator gives the viewing angle each size up to 100" fills from your seat. 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. If the room is dark and the picture is the point, the Sony VPL-XW5000ES against the Epson LS12000 is the head-to-head at that end of the catalog.
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.