Comparing LCD and LED projectors: apples and oranges?

[Haopengyou]

I am shopping for a projector and would prefer to buy an LED projector because of the substantially longer lifespan of the bulb. I have noticed, though, that the lumens for LED's are much lower than LCD's. How do i compare the two?

[Case]

1/ The more ambient light, the more image brightness the projector should produce. Can you make the viewing room pitch black? The bigger the projection surface, the more image brightness you need. How big do you want to project?
2/ For home cinema use, I wouldn't settle for less than full HD output. I haven't seen a LED projector do 1920x1080 yet. PowerPoint style presentations usually can get away with a modest 800x600.

[turk690]

Great strides have been made in LED technology such that it is ever-so-glacially taking over some others that were mainstays, like general lighting and LCD backlights. They are also now being used in the pico-projector category as light source, but with lumen output that low it's not really going to compete with a mainstream home theater projector like the Panasonic PT-AE4000.
But if cost is little to no-objection, LEDs can be engineered to actually trump what any ole halogen lamp or so can offer. There are whole web sites devoted to how environmental we'd all be if all, say, public lighting in a city could all be LEDs. Companies like Philips, Cree, and Seoul semiconductor are some of the leaders here.
Back to our original topic, some companies have actually used LED as light source in a mainstream projector (NOT pico). For example, Projectorcentral.com talks about one such, a Runco QuantumColor Q-750d (http://www.projectorcentral.com/Runco-QuantumColor_Q-750d.htm). To coax out that amount of light will make the LEDs run as hot as hell, so a lot of attention has to be paid to how to dissipate this heat. May be one reason this Runco 1920x1080 projector itself is humongous. But that shouldn't be a problem if you have the $18,000 to pay for it...
If u ask me, although LEDs do have relatively long lifetimes, they're presently still very expensive (at least in projector light-source duty) for anything other than measly toylike low-resolution pico-projectors that produce images you have to watch in complete & utter darkness. Rather than lose sleep over that, I'll take any current 3LCD halogen-lamp lit projector for now, like the Panasonic model I just mentioned. No single DLP either, but that's another discussion.

[propbroker]

Hi, just surfed in. I'm looking for an LED Projector myself. I know as of 3-4 years ago, there was basically NOTHING in the LED Projector market. Now besides the Runco and Christie high dollar ($$$$$) LED projectors, there's some middle of the road projectors that are better than picos, but not quite as good as what you call "mainstream". I think the top 3 are:

Acer K11, SVGA 200 Lumens - $359
http://www.overstock.com/Electronics/Acer-K11-DLP-Projector/5199510/product.html?cid=1...:referralID=NA

Aaxa M2, XGA 110 Lumens - $349
http://www.amazon.com/AAXA-Technologies-M2-Projector-entertainment/dp/B004BM2OS4/ref=s...8595494&sr=8-1

LG HX300, XGA 250 Lumens - $684
http://www.amazon.com/HX300G-300-Lumens-1024-2000/dp/B003AM2TYU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=e...8595517&sr=1-1

Not quite 1000 Lumens and 720P like I am looking for - but starting to come close!