My roommate and I heard that it’s possible to project the picture from our TV set onto the wall. We’d love to sit on our porch and watch TV while drinking a beer. Any ideas? – JK
The simple answer to your question is yes, you can do it. But you’ll encounter two significant problems with trying to turn your ordinary TV into a projection system. First, the lens you’ll need to do the projection will be extremely large and expensive. Second, the image you’ll see will be flipped horizontally and vertically. You’ll have to hang upside-down from your porch railing, which will make drinking a beer rather difficult.
About the lens: in principle, all you need is one convex lens. A giant magnifying glass will do. But it has a couple of constraints. Because your television screen is pretty large, the lens diameter must also be pretty large. If it is significantly smaller than the TV screen, it won’t project enough light onto your wall. And to control the size of the image it projects on the wall, you’ll need to pick just the right focal length (curvature) of the lens. You’ll be projecting a real image on the wall, a pattern of light that exactly matches the pattern of light appearing on the TV screen. The size and location of that real image depends on the lens’s focal length and on its distance from the TV screen. You’ll have to get these right or you’ll see only a blur. Unfortunately, single lenses tend to have color problems and edge distortions. Projection lenses need to be multi-element carefully designed systems. Getting a good quality, large lens with the right focal length is going to cost you.
The other big problem is more humorous. Real images are flipped horizontally and vertically relative to the light source from which they originate. Unless you turn your TV set upside-down, your wall image will be inverted. And, without a mirror, you can’t solve the left-right reversal problem. All the writing will appear backward. Projection television systems flip their screen image to start with so that the projected image has the right orientation. Unless you want to rewire your TV set, that’s not going to happen for you. Good luck.