Tech Tips

LED Lumens VS ANSI Lumens: What Are the Differences?

It is known that lumens are the brightness unit in the projector areas. However, many projector manufacturers label their products with various lumen units, making consumers confused.

Recently, many manufacturers label their LED projectors with LED lumens. Many projector users don’t know the difference between LED lumens and ANSI lumens.

ANSI lumens are widely recognized in the world, which reflects the brightness of a projection image from a projector. ANSI stands for American National Standards Institute. As the gold standard for brightness measure, ANSI lumens can better reflect the brightness of a projector.

LED lumens are not internal brightness standards but are adopted by some LED projector manufacturers. It is based on Helmholtz–Kohlrausch (HK) effect, which believes that the human eye views highly-saturated colors as brighter than they objectively are. Put it easily, LED lumens are the brightness sensed by the human eye.

How to Convert LED Lumens to ANSI lumens?

Generally, 1,000 LED lumens can be converted to 417 ANSI lumens. In other words, LED lumen value ÷ 2.4 = ANSI lumens.

For example, 120 LED lumens can be converted to 50 ANSI lumens, and 1200 LED lumens can be converted to 500 ANSI lumens.

Here is a table for Conversion between LED lumens and ANSI lumens.

LED Lumens	ANSI Lumens
120	50
288	120
480	200
600	250
1,200	500
1,440	600
1,920	800
2,400	1,000
1,800	2,000

You can use the online lumens converter tool to convert more data and more brightness units.

Please note that if the manufacturer adopts a different conversion rate when labeling LED lumens, the number should be subject to their official data.