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BenQ HT6050 Home Theater Projector Review - Picture Quality 2

Posted on November 17, 2016 by Art Feierman
BenQ HT6050 Projector Review - Picture Quality 2: Sports and HDTV viewing, Overall Picture Quality This page summarizes my impressions from using the BenQ HT6050 extensively for viewing sports and other HDTV content (streaming too), as well as our overall assessment of the viewing experience based on the picture quality and color accuracy. Note that, as in all of our 1080p projector reviews, the photos of the projected images have been resized to only 1000 pixels wide (not 1080p's 1920 pixels wide), and of course heavily compressed (Photoshop's Save for Web mode), so the photos are not remotely as sharp as the actual projected image, a touch noisier and dynamic range is somewhat compressed.
 

HT6050 Handling HDTV and Sports Content

I would have to say that my experiences viewing sporting events, concert videos and general HDTV - such as Blacklist, Colbert, Fallon, Westworld (still trying to figure out whether I like that one), and major events, have been the highlight of my viewing with the HT6050.

The very best experience using the HT6050 was watching football on Sundays.  The colors just popped!  Reds really were exceptional.  Greens were not at all "over the top," Everything looked very saturated, but not too saturated. I cannot recall the last time I had a projector here where I was so impressed with how good the players uniforms looked, and I watched a lot of games, so saw the full range of colors from different teams.

Generally with a projector in the over $2000 price range, we consider them more ideal for movies, but not in this case.  The native sharpness of this HT6050 DLP projector, lends itself nicely to sports viewing.

Colors pop - especially in Vivid mode which I used for almost all sports and probably over half of all HDTV content I watched.

Add to that plenty of brightness for a home Theater projector (vs brighter, but generally lower quality home Entertainment projectors), and I found that filling a 100" diagonal screen for my sports viewing even with my window shutters open a bit.

I found BenQ's CFI (as noted earlier) to be very respectable on sports. There are always detectable motion artifacts when using CFI, but I rarely noticed unless I was looking for them.

Picture Sharpness

I often talk about processed sharpness.  3 panel projectors - 3LCD or LCoS, inherently have conversion problems that they deal with digitally. With this single chip DLP, of course, there are no multiple panel/chip convergence problems, so the sharpness is "natural" limited by things such as the optical quality of the lens (this one seems rather good), and light path (which affects blooming), which in turn can dilute the contrast between light and adjacent dark areas, thus detracting from the sharpness. For example, the Epson HC5040UB/PC6040UB, does a lot of image processing, for both alignment and enhanced sharpness.  I describe that as having a trade-off weakness of the image sometimes looking "hard."

By comparison, the BenQ's sharpness definitely seems natural - unprocessed, by comparison.  That in its own right, is a very good thing.

Bottom line on viewing sports and general HDTV - a most enjoyable and nicely bright viewing experience.

HT6050 Overall Picture Quality

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I have always really liked good DLP projectors, despite my being rainbow sensitive.  Thanks to a very fast 6 segment color wheel, I saw almost no rainbows, (small flashes of color when white objects move fast across black or near black, or vice versa), perhaps a couple / few in an entire movie.  So you other rainbow sensitive folks, this is about as good as a DLP gets, and not an issue to most of us.

 

As to the rest, loved the color, the sharpness, and a whole lot more.

Dark shadow detail was great, if not the best, but the HT6050's one real weakness seems self inflicted, and that's their dynamic iris, or rather, that it doesn't work in the modes where you would definitely want it operating. I am perhaps the biggest cheerleader for great black level performance for those very dark scenes, and this is an area where the BenQ behaves more like projectors selling for half the price.

For me, that is why I favor normal sports and hdtv viewing (on this BenQ) where really dark scenes are far, far, less common (I'm not talking about watching movies over HDTV.)

If you have some modest ambient light you never can get rid of, that demotes the importance of great black levels, but for most with a theater type setup, I would not be happy with this black level performance.

Bottom Line for the general price range ($2000 - $4000):  Great color, better than most, weak black level performance, weaker than most.

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