How a great Epson projector can turn your park, hall or backyard into a World Cup live site!

Matilda’s fever is at peak levels here in Australia, and while there are stadiums to attend the tickets are all sold, and those amazing official Live Sites are in the big cities and might be a bit far to take the little ones for a night-time game. So why not create your own live site?

Well, thats exactly what we did in our local area.

The local football club were keen to get together to watch the Matilda’s group stage games, so with approval from the local council, set about making an event of things.

Not looking to rival Tumbalong Park, we used large outdoor shades as the screen, and turned to our mates at Epson for a projector to do the job.

I’ve got an Epson projector in my man-cave at home, and that unit, worth probably $2-3,000 in today’s money did a good job of lighting up the screen – but we wanted something more.

So, we borrowed a EB-PU1008WN – this thing would make Event Cinemas smile, and for projection there’s a couple of key things. The lens and the light power.

This beast is capable of 8,500 lumens of light from the laser, and let me tell you, it lit up that screen when the sun hadn’t even gone down.

Setup was simple, with easy front “feet” adjustments to line things up – then we could just walk the desk back to get the biggest screen possible. We were roughly 10 meters back from the screen, and the size of the projected image was easily 5.5 meters diagonally.

What’s amazing if you haven’t seen projectors of late is their support for things like HDR and even Gamma correction, and of course 4K.

Even more so, the crazy 2.5million to one contrast ratio which gives great detail even in dark scenes.

And we didn’t even scratch the surface. NFC connection for setup, networking, edge blending to use multiple projectors for an even bigger screen, it’s all there.

While this unit is most certainly suited for commercial purposes and perhaps a high end home theatre, if you’re looking for a projector to give you a big-screen experience at your place, I’d recommend this one from Epson at Harvey Norman, it’s the same, or just a slightly more modern equivalent of the unit I’m using at home, while Epson also have units priced between $800 and $4000 to suit all needs and budgets.

Massive thanks to Bruce and the team at Epson for supporting my little “local live site” experiment. And Go Matildas!