Emily Parker

I have spent the last three months living with eight different soundbars in my living room, bedroom, and a small home office. I watched late-night thrillers with my partner, ran a four-hour gaming session on a PS5, and let my kids stream cartoons at 6 a.m. to find out what the best soundbars really deliver … Read more

Three years ago I bought a “10,000-lumen” projector for under $80 and got a glorified flashlight. The picture washed out the second I opened a curtain, the battery died 40 minutes into a movie, and the “smart OS” took 30 seconds to load Netflix. I have spent the time since then testing every best portable … Read more

I spent six weekends testing the best outdoor projectors in my backyard with my family, dragging each unit through three core scenarios: a dusk movie night with the kids, an evening football watch party with friends, and a dark-sky camping setup. After running 8 projectors across these conditions and logging brightness, image clarity, audio quality, … Read more

Searching for the best ultra short throw projectors usually starts with a simple wish: get a television-sized picture without hanging a big screen or running a cable across the room. An ultra short throw projector can produce a 100- to 120-inch image from less than a foot away, which is why it works so well … Read more

When I plugged a PS5 into my first “gaming projector” three years ago, I was greeted with motion blur, 80ms of input lag, and a washed-out image. It was a frustrating disaster. Since then, our team has tested dozens of projectors specifically tuned for gaming, and the best projectors for gaming in are genuinely competitive … Read more

I spent three weekends testing eight different budget projectors in my living room and backyard, and the results surprised me. Three years ago, cheap projectors under $100 were basically toys — dim, washed-out, capped at 480p. Today, the best budget projectors under $130 deliver native 1080p resolution, built-in streaming apps, and surprisingly bright images that … Read more

I learned how much a projector screen actually matters the first time I dragged a $45 fabric panel home for a backyard movie night. The difference versus the beige wall I had been using was not subtle. Blacks stopped looking gray, edges stopped looking soft, and my budget BenQ finally looked like the projector I … Read more

I have spent the last two summers testing outdoor projector screens in real backyard conditions, and I can tell you the difference between a sheet hung on a fence and a real outdoor movie screen is night and day. After setting up eight models across 30 movie nights with groups ranging from 4 to 40 … Read more

I spent six weeks testing eight of the most popular motorized projector screens on Amazon, watching everything from 4K movies to console games at midnight with my partner asleep in the next room. Some screens barely made a sound rolling down. One sounded like a garage door opener stuck mid-cycle. A couple developed gentle waves … Read more

I spent the last two months testing ambient light rejecting screens in my living room, with curtains open during the day and ceiling lights on at night, to find the best ALR projector screens worth your money. After running the same test patterns, movies, and sports broadcasts across all ten models, the differences were dramatic. … Read more