BenQ W1000 - Physical Tour2

Posted on March 14, 2010 by Art Feierman

BenQ W1000 Menus

Again, the BenQ W1000 projector's kinship with the Vivitek H1080FD projector is obvious. The menus look only slightly different (fonts, borders), and most things are in exactly the same place as on the Vivitek, but not everything. Overall, the menus, are reasonably well laid out. Just about all the image controls are found on the first two menus, as is typical. The lamp brightness control is on the second last menu.

BenQ W1000 Remote Control

Click to Enlarge.So close

It's black, the backlit buttons are fairly bright (red). Not as easy to read though, as the Vivitek's blue lights. Still, that's not a big deal. It's much nicer than the Optoma HD20 with its blindingly bright blue light. With the Optoma, I couldn't even make subtle adjustments to the image without holding the remote behind me, as the remote's light was so bright, I couldn't see what I was doing. That isn't an issue with the BenQ remote control.

The remote control's range is pretty good, though not exceptional. I can get a good bounce off my front wall and screen - 11 feet to the front, and 16 back to the projector, without too much difficulty. Probably more than half of the remotes I work with have less range than this one.

The W1000 remote control itself, is well laid out. Separate Off and On buttons are at the top. Next comes 6 direct input buttons for your sources, including two HDMI buttons.

Below that, the usual four navigation buttons, with a centered Enter button. And right below those, is the small Menu button (bottom left) and across from it, the Aspect Ratio button.

Click Image to Enlarge

The lower half of the remote has five rows of three buttons (with good spacing, I must note). The first row provides direct access to the three User modes. The next two rows are mostly direct access buttons for image controls like Contrast, Brightness, Sharpness. The last two rows have volume up and down, Freeze, Blank, (back)Light and Test (pattern).

All considered it is a very nice remote, better than most! I like it.