EIKI LC-WUL100A Projectors
EIKI LC-WUL100A Projectors
by Chris Kuntz
Emmanuel Community Church in Fort Wayne, IN, is a community of people committed to giving Jesus Christ our worship through the careful study of His Word and the application in our walk, thus being disciples who share His warmth and do His Work to reach our World. We offer three service times weekly, with our main sanctuary seating about 560 people, and our video venue satellite room (which is on site, but offers a more relaxed atmosphere for attendees) which is capable of seating 600-700 people. Our Saturday evening service runs in our video venue room, and we run two services Sunday morning, in both our main sanctuary and satellite area. We average about 1800 people in all services combined every week.
We recently purchased five EIKI LC-WUL100A 5,000 lumens projectors for our church. We use four in the main sanctuary – three to the front of the room and one for our rear confidence screen, and the fifth is in our satellite room serving as a confidence monitor. The main reason for our purchase was our need for a technology upgrade.
All the video for our services is produced in-house; with short videos, story-telling videos, etc., created with a focus on enhancing the worship experience at Emmanuel – and everything is produced in HD. However, most of our older projectors were standard definition and none of our video content was translating properly to screen. Just about any household you go into nowadays has HD screens in the home, and we didn’t want our people coming to church and seeing substandard definition compared to what they were getting at home. We wanted to make sure that what they were seeing in church was just as good as what they were receiving outside of it.
We knew we had to make the switch to HD projection, and that’s where EIKI came in. The LC-WUL100A’s not only improved the overall image quality, but allow us to see on screen exactly what is being produced in the studio.
There are several things we love about the EIKI projectors. They are really rich in their color saturation – when they went up, we were in awe of the color and how fine the detail was in what we were seeing. The brightness and the clarity is brilliant, the projector cuts through the stage lighting and remains bright and clear against the screens. They’re connected through our network, so we’re able to turn the projectors on and off through our computers. We can change settings, make small alignment changes in the lens without having to touch the projector (and no climbing ladders!), monitor temperature, color ratings, lamp life, etc., all from our computers, which is a huge bonus. One of our criteria was that the projector was 1080i, and this was an option available on this projector.
In our main sanctuary, we currently project to three screens; two sides and a center screen. The side screens are typically lyrics, words, key note presentations, etc., and the main screen is normally for the series artwork. Our confidence screen at the back of the room mimics the side screens at the front.
The video venue has its own worship band playing the same music as the band plays in the sanctuary, with the main lesson shared via projection. Everything fed to the projectors is run through our Blackmagic ATEM production studio, so training our volunteers wasn’t difficult at all as they were already familiar with the system, and integration was almost flawless. Custom Sign Design was able to take out the old projectors and install the new ones within a week.
The price point for us was fabulous, less than $4500 for each projector, and we were able to use the stock lenses because of the way we hung the projectors. Our average throw between projectors and screen is no more than 30 feet, but EIKI provides seven or eight different lens options. The majority of churches would be able to use a projector like this with the lens options they have available.
If your church is looking for a projector that is able to reproduce the clarity and color you see in your HD video or on your computer screen, has high quality image reproduction, clarity and brightness, then you should consider EIKI. That’s what they do for us, and we couldn’t be happier.
