BenQ EH600 Smart Business Projector Review – Picture Quality

BenQ EH600 Smart Business Projector – Picture Quality: Color Reproduction, Black Levels and Shadow Detail, Text Readibility

The above screen shots are intended to give only a rough idea of the color accuracy for each picture mode. However, when viewed in person the color accuracy will generally look somewhat better than shown in these photos. The images show the difference in color and skin tones, for the different Preset picture modes.

There are seven factory color presets. The following observations were generally made with the projector using its factory default picture settings.

• Bright Picture Mode:This is the brightest but least accurate picture mode. This mode would be most appropriate for displaying presentation materials where color accuracy was not of great concern and the room has a large amount of ambient light.
• Presentation Picture Mode:This is the second brightest mode but it offers much better white balance and color reproduction.
• Infographic Picture Mode: Designed for projecting graphics. This picture mode has a somewhat cool (bluish) color temperature.
• Video Picture Mode: Intended for TV viewing. While fairly accurate, its color temperature was a little cooler than ideal.
• sRGB Picture Mode: While this picture mode was the least bright, it delivered the most accurate colors out-of-the-box.
• User 1-2 Picture Mode:Color reproduction and white balance are similar to the sRGB mode.

For those who want to further fine tune the EH600 color reproduction, the projector has most of the advanced color adjustments found BenQ higher end projector including color temperature, RGB balance (contrast, brightness) and CMS.

The BenQ EH600 offers a couple of picture modes that had good picture quality and I found the best quality, in terms of color accuracy, to be the sRGB and User modes. The screen shots above were taken with the EH600 in User 1 mode. Since the EH600 includes user adjustments for white balance, gamma, and color temperature, I am sure it could be adjusted to produce a more accurate picture.

Above are screenshots of a variety of HD videos and photos. Like all our photos, they remain unadjusted for color, so they do not look as good as what the projector produced.

Overall, the video picture quality was good for classroom projector at this price point.  While not perfect, the overall color accuracy was very good, with natural looking skin tones, and reasonable image contrast.

The BENQ EH600 has a claimed dynamic contrast ratio of 6,000:1. The EH600’s black levels where closer dark grey than pure black but I didn’t expect a thousand-dollar business projector to rival black of a home theater projector. I would call the BENQ EH600s black levels a medium-dark grey. In the average meeting room, which normally has some ambient light, the black level is good enough to recognizable as black. While the blacks weren’t super deep, due to the fact it was capable of deliver 3500 lumens the brightness, the overall contrast of the BenQ EH600 would be more than enough the satisfy the average user.

The native Full HD (1920 x1080) resolution of the BenQ EH600 results in good text clarity. While there will be some meeting/classroom applications where more 4k resolution could be useful but the EH600 has more than enough resolution for viewing PowerPoint slides or Excel worksheets at a normal viewing distance.

If the font size is too fine for the EH600 to resolve, then the text is probably way too small to use in a PowerPoint. When my attached laptop PC, there were very few office documents where more resolution would have been useful. If you need to look at something in more detail the EH600 has an image 2X zoom feature.