Kudos, Art! Your throughput and at the same time your thoroughness of the review is impressive.

One recommendation especially in light of the upcoming Epsons: are your ANSI contrast measurements comparable between the reviews?
It would be great to have a table of contrast, noise and lumen output.

Keep going

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Greetings Maitre,

Ahh, a very good question, regarding measurements.

First, let me say, that at this time, I don’t plan to measure contrast. While there is some useful information in having true ANSI contrast, or even measured On/Off, those things tend to lose relevance, as soon as you kick on a dynamic iris, or some other dynamic features (dynamic lamp control, etc.). As a result, I believe that subjective analysis, based on extended viewing, and my side by side viewing (when comparable projectors are here at the same time), provides a much more useful understanding of what to expect in black level performance.

Next, yes, our measurements are all comparable from one review to the next. Reviews done prior to April of this year had all the measurements and calibration done by me. Since then, they’ve been done by Mike. He and I, however have the same equipment, and Mike is the guy, who a half dozen years ago, taught me basic calibration. We are confident that the numbers are consistent, with the usual minor differences. In some areas, though, such as “tuning” a dynamic mode, I allow a little more image quality degradation than he does, so in a dynamic mode his numbers might be anywhere from the same, to 10% less than mine. Of course, at this point, the only “primary” projectors that people are considering, that go back to my calibrations are the Epson 1080 UB, the Panasonic PT-AX200U, and the JVC projectors. And of those, the new JVCs and Epsons are imminent in terms of new models being reviewed.

OK, now I am going to post a longish email response I sent out to another reader, last night. He asked why, for example I measured about 1600 lumens in Dynamic mode with the recent (this past week) Sanyo PLV-Z3000, while Evan, over at Projector Central, was over 300 lumens less. This is a long answer, but may help readers understand the vagaries of measuring today’s projectors with dynamic features.

So, here goes:

I presume you are referring to Evan’s review (projector central). I haven’t seen it yet, but when we talked earlier in the week he indicated it would be up, by now.

No Evan and I are both measuring ANSI lumens, but his settings are different than mine.

The Dynamic mode (of the Sanyo) normally defaults to A1 on the lamp mode (one of the two dynamic lamp modes). A1 causes a significant drop in maximum lumens as indicated in the posted measurements, if you take a closer look.

Same is true for the dynamic iris, which also defaults to on, instead of fixed, at the expense of lumens.

As far as I am concerned, the purpose of a Dynamic mode is to give you maximum lumens at the expense of overall image accuracy (as long as its still reasonably watchable). Assuming you have enough ambient light, to need Dynamic, any insignificant improvements in black levels are going to be completely lost in the ambient light.

In addition, non-movie content is generally not black level critical - who cares when watching sports, or a sitcom?

Even the best dynamic irises and lamp dimming schemes are occasionally detectable. I can spot the lamp dimming on sports quite often when they change camera angles, and regardless of projector I don’t use dynamic (black level related) features for sports.

So, I recommend Full lamp, and iris wide open and fixed. Basically that accounts for about 300 lumens difference, if I recall correctly.

Other than that, Evan and I use different gear and software. For whatever reason, my measurements in most reviews tend to run brighter than his, but typically about 7-10%. When measuring, even consecutive readings have a couple of percent error.

Typically if he measures 1200 lumens on a projector I tend to be in the high 1200’s.

Mike, who has been doing my calibrations (freeing up my time), owns the same equipment I do. Both of our Optic One’s are consistent with each other, within the normal margin of error. Evan has two different rigs, and his two are close to each other.

So, bottom line, the huge difference between his maximum readings and mine in this case, are primarily do to different settings. This is a problem with projectors with almost an infinite number of feature combinations. Evan went with the default, and I went with what I recommend and think best.

He and I also noticed the difference, and discussed it, and figured it out a couple of days ago, before he published. That’s why I have the answer at my fingertips.

One, last thing. Apples to apples, I try to make my reviews consistent, and that includes measurement decisions. Thus, compare the brightest modes of a number of projectors, and my standards are the same - what I think is the best setup for practical use.

In some cases, take the Epson Home Cinema 1080 UB, or 720, can’t remember which, offhand, I had measurements of almost 1900 lumens in dynamic, but the yellows (and greens) were so over the top, that I felt that to make it watchable, some work was needed to tame the image, and that dropped my recommended settings down a couple hundred lumens to 1665.

And that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Not bad? -art