NEC VE281X DLP Projector - Performance

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Eric Pfoutz

NEC VE281X Projector - Brightness

Performance is definitely not a shortcoming of this projector. Rated at 2800 lumens, the NEC VE281X DLP projector performed very well, and up to what the manufacturer specified. Even beyond. The projector has both a standard brightness mode, and a ECO Mode. For the longest lamp life you want to run the projector in ECO Mode. The readings turned out to be quite impressive. Along with there being a standard brightness and a ECO brightness, you have different image presets that optimize the projector for the content you plan to present. This often changes the brightness of the image, and that is what we are testing for this part of the review.

With the projector in Presentation Mode, we got a light output of 2534 lumens. In ECO Mode that same setting produced 1788 lumens. In Video Mode the projector performed at 1408 lumens for the default brightness setting, and 1027 for ECO Mode. Movie Mode brought the brightness up a bit from Video mode to 1689, and in ECO Mode we got a reading of 1196. Graphic Mode produced 1576 lumens, and 1126 in ECO Mode. sRGB mode often has similar readings as Graphic Mode, and so the results were 1633 and 1154 for ECO Mode. High Bright Mode was a real surprise with a light output of 3308 lumens. and 2393 lumens for ECO Mode.

I would strongly discourage running the projector in High Bright Mode with ECO Mode turned off. The lamp would definitely have a short life. It was my experience that the projector ran quite well in Presentation Mode, with ECO Mode turned on.

NEC VE281X Projector - Video

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Ultimately, the NEC VE281X was not designed to be a home theater, but the performance was better than expected, and because the projector is 3D Ready, good image quality will be important. Since the projector does except HDMI, it will be possible to use high resolution content. The VE281X is a native 1024x768 projector, so not a HD projector, but the compression of the image was good enough to say that this projector will handle video nicely in a classroom or training environment.