16:9 monitors with a 4:3 projector.

[Summit Com Systems]

Good Morning! I've got a relatively simple question that I am having a hard time thinking through. Perhaps someone on here has dealt with this. I've got a client that needs to keep a 4:3 projector installed in their space. They have a very limited area for the image and it even actually overlaps a couple of architectural features that they edit their slides layouts around. It is my thinking that if they switched to a 16:9/10 projector then they would lose the extra bit of vertical image within this space and would have poor text height or limited slide space in the end. So, I am thinking that they should stay in 4:3, but to make things interesting, they want us to add two 'confidence monitors' on the altar for the pastor and choir to follow. My stumbling point is how I can distribute the source to both the 16:9 monitors and the 4:3 projector simultaneously without requiring them to invest in a robust processor.
My initial thinking was to use an HDMI DA that uses network cable and keep it very simple, but I know that if I can get them all to sync to the DA that the 16:9 displays will only go 4:3 (since that is the highest common mode between all displays). While I don't want to scale the monitors, might I have to? It is somewhat of a tough call for me to decide which will be better, black bars or a stretched image.... Should I look for a 16:9 native projector that will go 4:3? If I do this, will the projector keep the DA synced at a 16:9 ratio for the confidence monitors while it displays 4:3?

I'm quite new here and I jumped right in with this, so my apologies if I missed any newbie guidelines in regards to posting/threads/etc. I appreciate any insight you might have. Thanks so much.

[Cornucopia]

IMO, Either:
1. Go with ALL 4:3 displays (the existing projector & new-ish 4:3 confidence monitors, as not all monitors are 16:9)
2. Go with ALL 16:9 displays (new 16:9 monitors + new 16:9 projector with wider-than-existing-spread) and pillarbox everything (so black will be projected onto those architectural items)
3. Get a switcher/processor that allows for separate ARs on separate splits ($$)

The idea of using a 16:9 proj that can also do 4:3 won't work the way you intend because when HDMI devices "negotiate" their signal, the sink (display) tells the source what they're capable of and then the source picks what is most NATIVE to the sink (in this case it would be 16:9).

Don't stretch the image, particularly if you are doing lots of text (which it sounds like you would be needing).

Scott

[Summit Com Systems]

Thanks for the reply! I appreciate your taking the time. I'm an audio guy by birth and have only taken on video in the past 5 years or so and I still very much feel the need to bounce video ideas off of folks who know video like I know my stuff....

As I was thinking, there really is no way to 'cheat' around this and produce desirable results. We've all seen bad scaling and it is rough for text indeed... I am going to encourage them to go with a 16:9 projector and see if they can revise their formatting to work with this. I feel that pillarbox or letterbox tends to 'devalue' an installation since the lay-person will not be able to understand much more than, "the picture doesn't fill the screen, so why did we spend all this money??"

Because of the required sizes of the confidence monitors needed to fit the altar space and the amount of text he puts on the slides, I feel that even with a really nice scaler, it would still be a pretty poor outcome....

Thanks again so much for your reply!