7060 Lamp Life and Replacement

7060 Lamp Life and Replacement

Planar 7060 Projector Screen Recommendations

Very good black levels allow the projector to work well with small gain white surfaces like the Stewart Studiotek 130, Carada Brilliant White, and similar surfaces, as well as with standard matte white screens. At the same time, my Firehawk (light gray, high contrast, with gain) worked well with the projector in my theater. For those of you with larger screens (say 110" or larger, the black levels should be suitably low enough to make the white gain surfaces, probably the best choice (unless you have specific ambient light fighting requirements that favor the HC grays). A Firehawk or similar HC gray surface, would be a very good choice for 110" or less, and especially for 100" or less screen sizes, as the black levels will get rather gray, on smaller screens with white surfaces.

Planar 7060 Calibration

Due to the issues with this pre-production projector, I didn't do all the white balance adjustments I normally measure and adjust - I'll save that for the "rematch" when they send me a production unit.

I did, however do most of the usual measurements. I found at Eco and Normal lamp settings, with the Color Temp set for 6500K, that the Planar 7060's measured color temperature is a little warmer (lower - redish) than 6500K. In fact white measured 6212K. What is impressive, is that there is virtually no color temperature variation between:

It is rare to see a projector that measures from 30IRE to 100IRE staying within 100K, even on far more expensive projectors.

There was virtually no shift in color temperature between the Eco and normal Settings. Setting Lamp mode to boost, did cool the color temperature rather nicely, to an almost ideal 6571K at 100IRE.

In Eco mode, using the 7500K setting brought white (100IRE) up to 6885K (still better for movies, than HDTV). Resetting color temp to 9000K yielded a 100IRE measurement of 8203K (pretty good for HDTV/sports)...

Planar 7060 Image Noise

No noteworthy problems here. I used the Silcon Optics HQV test disk, the 7060 performed very well on jaggie tests, was very good on most noise, a trifle slow on the motion artifact test panning the empty seats in a NASCAR stadium), and handled normal cadances fine, but had problems with some of the usually difficult ones. Overall, its a slightly less noisy DLP projector in this regard, than most in its price range or below. On fixed scenes that look like still type photo images, it is still noisier, though, than most LCD projectors.

OK that was a lot to digest. The next section warranty, will, by comparison, only set you back about 30 seconds or so. Next....