BenQ W1500 Projector - Performance

The chart above shows Mike's measurements for each of the modes.  As you can see, Standard and User 1, 2, and 3 are apparently the same, with just minor variations in Mike's measurements.

The BenQ W1500 measured 1713 lumens in its brightest mode - Dynamic.  Keep in mind that's at midpoint on the zoom.  That's a whole lot of lumens.  There are some brighter projectors, but none that have measured more than 2400, and only a few over 2000 lumens, compared to this BenQ's 1927 lumens at full wide angle on the zoom.

One of the nice things is that the BenQ is almost as bright calibrated as uncalibrated.   Being calibrated costs barely more than 10% of brightness compared to brightest mode.  In fact, the calibrated mode, proved to be virtually identical in brightness to the pre-calibration Cinema mode on which it was based!

Moving the projector back from the closest placement that would fill your screen, to filling it with the zoom at the middle of it's range, as you can see from the table above, results in a drop of about 11%.

Going from full wide-angle to full telephoto, by comparison results in a drop of about 27%.  Those differences will be consistent no matter which mode you are working from

The BenQ W1500 has an unusually large drop in brightness when switching to Eco-mode.  Most projectors drop 25-35%.

The W1500 drops from 1597 to 955 lumens, which represents a drop of an almost perfect 40%. Even so, 955 lumens would be too bright for some folks if they were filling a typical 100" 16:9 screen with a 1.3 gain, when viewing it a good, dark theater type environment.  Mind you, most people would not have a problem with that much brightness, most folks complain about not enough brightness, but that won't be the problem here.

For out of the box best color, note that Eco-mode is a touch cooler, and closer to the ideal 6500K!

With the exception of white (100 IRE) which barely changed with the calibration, the numbers are very tight, post-calibration.  The color temperature averages within 50K of target, which is to say, very close!  No wonder color looks so good!