Two Projectors

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I will be showing a presentation in June and we have had so many people sign up, that they want to use 2 projectors, since it will be hard for everyone to see the main screen. The hall we are using is long and narrow, and it’s a luncheon, so they don’e want everyone to have to move to see it.

I can set up the laptop so that it is about 25 feet from each projector, maybe a little over. I have one 25 feet cable that connects the laptop to the projector, so I could move the laptop closer to one projector and get a longer cable for the the other.

I know that I will need a splitter and I’m assuming that I will have to do something to boost the signal coming out of the laptop. I was wondering if anyone has done this and is it worth pursuing. If it turns out one of the images, or both, are bad, I would just as soon only show it on one screen and make everyone move. Anyone have any experience with this type of thing that they could share? Thanks.

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The simple, low tech, solution to this problem is to connect a second laptop to the second projector and have a colleague update that one whenever you update yours.

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I will be showing a presentation in June and we have had so many people sign up, that they want to use 2 projectors, since it will be hard for everyone to see the main screen. The hall we are using is long and narrow, and it’s a luncheon, so they don’e want everyone to have to move to see it.

I can set up the laptop so that it is about 25 feet from each projector, maybe a little over. I have one 25 feet cable that connects the laptop to the projector, so I could move the laptop closer to one projector and get a longer cable for the the other.

I know that I will need a splitter and I’m assuming that I will have to do something to boost the signal coming out of the laptop. I was wondering if anyone has done this and is it worth pursuing. If it turns out one of the images, or both, are bad, I would just as soon only show it on one screen and make everyone move. Anyone have any experience with this type of thing that they could share? Thanks.

Not sure if there are other meeting rooms and other resources that you have available – you could use WebEx in a completely different room, which would need a computer, projector and polycom or handsfree telephone… just a thought??

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I don’t want to hijack this thread if my own suggestion isn’t close enough, so I hope the moderator will relocate or trash it if appropriate, or delete this sentence if OK. Even or especially PowerPoint pundits, and the great Microsoft itself, can learn to apply a ninety-degree visual switch if it is available.

I don’t know enough about electronic projectors to know their capabilities, but I do know that I would much prefer monitors, especially for something like a luncheon. I’ll carry that a bit further and say that dedicated convention facilities that feature suitable monitors might be a profitable enterprise, and prospective backers waving money are welcome to my services. That includes Microsoft for the PowerPoint suggestion.

My suggestion concerns format. If you want a more interesting and versatile presentation, you might consider having the capability of displaying portrait as well as landscape images. This requires that you have the images to feed the display, but it might add visual interest to what is almost invariably a procession of strictly-landscape images.

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I just wanted to post and let you know what ended up happening.

I agree with Peterg that monitors would be better but that just wasn’t an available option.

I had to run the whole thing from one laptop, because we also had music and video and we never could have synced that up. One of our members was able to borrow an Optoma projector, no idea what model or anything but it had a VGA Out option. I already had a 25′ VGA cable, so we hooked the Optoma up to the laptop, then connected the other projector to that and it really seemed to work out well.

I would have preferred to have a longer cable, I was kind of stretched to the limit with the 25′ one, but I don’t know if a longer cable would have degraded the signal or not.

Our room was really packed, with people sitting at round tables, so having another screen at a different angle really made it a lot easier to see. The picture was good on both screens and everything ran together, no delays or anything like that. All in all, it was a very sucessful event.

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Thanks for letting us know how it went.

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I had to run the whole thing from one laptop, because we also had music and video and we never could have synced that up.

A tool like NetMeeting would have allowed you to display the SAME image on both laptops, and you could connect them with quite a long Ethernet cable.

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