I love watching sport outside.
I think it's at least partly thanks to fond memories of watching football matches in pub gardens, cold beer in hand, sun on my back, perhaps a bowl of chips within arm's reach. Glorious.
These days, my pub garden visits are a little less frequent, so ahead of the World Cup I decided to try to bring the experience home. My plan was simple: set up a projector in the garden, fire up the BBQ and spend the summer watching football under the open sky.
What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Before we begin, I should point out that while I've spent almost 20 years reviewing TVs, projectors and home cinema kit, I have exactly zero experience of building an outdoor cinema. I also approached this project with a level of wanton optimism that, in hindsight, was entirely unsupported by evidence.
Still, if nothing else, my mistakes might help you avoid making the same ones.
Mistake 1: assuming an indoor projector would work outside before dark
The first challenge was deciding what to use as a display.
The windows for three rooms of our house face the garden, which limits the available wall space. After some negotiations with my equally football-obsessed wife, it was agreed that a projector screen could temporarily be hung across the dining room windows.
A projector seemed the obvious answer. After all, I wanted the biggest image possible, and no TV I can afford stretches to 150 inches.
While a portable projector might seem the natural choice, most battery-powered models aren't especially bright and often won't last through an entire football match. Since I was going to need mains power anyway, I borrowed the Hisense M2 Pro from our review stockroom.
It's a five-star projector, it's relatively compact, and it supports both BBC iPlayer and ITVX – a surprisingly rare combination in projector land and an essential one for World Cup duty in the UK.
So far, so sensible.
Then came Friday evening. Canada versus Bosnia and Herzegovina. Kick-off at 8pm.
At around 6pm, I wheeled the projector into position using some spare sections of hi-fi rack, ran an extension cable across the garden and powered everything up.
And... nothing.
Well, not quite nothing. The projector was clearly producing light, but there was no discernible image on the screen.
I moved the projector closer.
Nothing.
Closer still.
Nothing.
Eventually, with the projector just inches from the screen, a tiny image emerged from the gloom.
At this point, I began to suspect that projecting onto a giant screen outdoors before sunset might not have been my finest idea.
To be clear, this wasn't blazing Mediterranean sunshine. It was an overcast British evening on the opposite side of the house to the sun. Yet even that proved too much for a projector rated at 1300 ANSI lumens.
The lesson? A projector that looks bright indoors can look surprisingly dim outside.
Mistake 2: buying the cheapest 150-inch screen I could find
Perhaps I should have mentioned the screen.
Wanting something easy to put up, take down and store, I ordered a portable 150-inch projector screen from Amazon for the princely sum of £36.
It had excellent reviews.
It also turned out to be little more than a stretchy white sheet with a black border.
In hindsight, perhaps "buy the cheapest giant screen available and hope for the best" wasn't the sort of rigorous testing methodology that has sustained my career for almost two decades.
The biggest problem, I think, was that the screen had no backing. I hadn't considered this when ordering, but once it was hanging in front of our dining room windows, I could immediately see the issue: light was passing straight through it.
Thankfully, the screen was at least easy to install. With the help of some included ropes, a couple of conveniently positioned hanging basket brackets and my long-suffering wife, it was up in a matter of minutes.
Unfortunately, being easy to hang is only one of the qualities you want in a projector screen.
Mistake 3: forgetting that darkness and warmth rarely arrive together in Britain
I left the projector running while I finished cremating dinner on the BBQ and hoped conditions would improve.
By the 8pm kick-off, the picture was technically watchable, but only just, so we ended up watching the first half indoors.
By half-time, though, it was a different story.
As darkness fell, the image suddenly looked pretty decent.
The projector had enough light output after all, but only when the sun stopped competing with it.
At this point, I was even able to move the M2 Pro further back, create a much larger image and enjoy a picture that was genuinely impressive considering the circumstances.
The projector automatically re-focused itself each time I moved it, too, which was very handy.
At last, I had the something approaching the outdoor football experience I'd been aiming for.
There was just one problem.
It was absolutely freezing – hence the blanket-covered child in the photo above.
After about 10 minutes, common sense prevailed and we headed back inside.
What I'd do differently
The good news is that most of the problems were self-inflicted.
For starters, I picked the wrong projector.
The Hisense M2 Pro is an excellent lifestyle projector that's plenty bright enough for indoor use. It was never designed for outdoor use, which is an entirely different challenge, and I should never have expected it to work in daylight, regardless of the overcast skies.
Clearly, something much brighter is required. Perhaps the 3500 ANSI lumen-rated BenQ TK705i or Nebula X1 Pro might fare better.
I also need a better screen. At the very least, one with a black backing to prevent light passing through it. An ambient light rejecting (ALR) screen would be better still, though those tend to cost considerably more and are often designed for permanent or semi-permanent installation, which isn't where I am with this project.
Finally, I hadn't considered comfort enough. The irony of outdoor football viewing in the UK is that the picture often improves just as the temperature drops to unpleasantly nippy levels.
So yes, this first attempt was largely a failure, and, at 10pm last night, I was ready to abandon the whole idea.
This morning, though, I found myself browsing projector screens again, and I'm already planning phase two, which will probably involve a better screen, a fire pit and the considerably brighter Nebula X1 Pro – which, handily, we currently have in for review.
If that doesn't work, I may have to accept that the answer isn't a projector at all, but an outdoor TV.
Unfortunately, outdoor TVs are eye-wateringly expensive, particularly at the sort of size I'm aiming for.
Which means there's every chance I'll end up exactly where I started: watching the World Cup indoors and wondering why I thought I knew better than the British weather.
MORE:
Here are the best outdoor projectors you can currently buy
And these are the best projectors in general
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