Projectors Considered: Larger Venue Projectors 1

The Canon WUX6000 is the flagship of Canon’s LCoS lineup of projectors.  It boasts 6000 lumens, WUXGA resolution (1920x1200), a choice of five interchangeable lenses, and motorized zoom, focus and lens shift!  This Canon projector, as you would imagine from Canon the camera company, is all about great color, or rather image quality.

Canon pretty much pioneered projectors with DICOM abilities – that is, high enough picture accuracy for use teaching at medical schools and hospitals, when displaying medical images such as X-rays, MRI’s Cat-scans, with enough quality to see the critical details.   The MSRP is $5499, but that’s not out of line for a high brightness, high resolution projector with a choice of lenses.  BTW that list price includes the standard 1.5:1 motorized lens.

Lamp life isn’t great – 3000 hours at full power and 4000 in their eco (PowerSaver) mode.  Don’t be surprised though, these high power projectors tend to run their lamps to squeeze out every lumen of brightness, so many projectors in this class lack the 4000 to 5000 hours at full power that small install projectors seem to offer.

This projector is a bit unusual, in that it would make sense to include it in the “standard” group of projectors, but also plays well in the Larger Venue group.

It is the brightest overall projector for the least money – at least among the full HD projectors.  With an MSRP of just $1999, it is the only larger venue projector in this report to break the $2000 price point.

The 1985WU is WUXGA (1920x1200), 3LCD, and extremely well endowed except in two areas.   For larger venues like university classrooms or small auditoriums it has a very flexible zoom lens (1.63:1), but no interchangeable lens options.  And it lacks lens shift, settling for some fancy keystone and corner correction.   Claiming 4800 lumens it competes head to head with the more expensive Sony VPL-CH375 which is also 3LCD (and 5000 lumens).  OK, it also lacks edge blending, but that’s only needed in multi-projector displays (such as in a museum).

This 5200 lumen LCD PA-521U is almost one of the more “normal” high brightness projectors in this review, but not really.  True, no lasers, just six interchangeable lenses, and manual, not motorized ones at that. OK, there’s also plenty of horizontal and vertical lens shift in this WUXGA projector (1920x1200).  The standard zoom lens, it should be noted has a 2:1 throw, best of this lot of projectors.

A REALLY interesting twist is four PA521’s can be combined (tiling) to create a 4K x 2K image for high brightness 4K display! That would be the equivalent of a 20,000 lumen 4K projector!  That’s brightest lumens, of course, and as is typical, not the best looking ones.

When it comes to brightness, this projector did measure over 5400 lumens at its brightest, but also offered a very impressive 4200 lumens in several modes with very good color – so let’s say 4Kx2K at over 16,000 lumens with four.