BenQ W1500 Projector – Picture Quality

One of the things I really like about the W1500 is that for those not very interested in fiddling, tweaking, or calibrating their projectors, thisBenQ is one that looks really good in most modes, without any adjustment.

Don’t get me wrong, Mike’s calibration did further improve the picture, but, compared to say the Optoma HD25-LV, a slightly less expensive competitor that’s also a DLP, that is similarly bright, you might think that the W1500 is calibrated, as it’s “out of the box” color accuracy general picture is so much better than that Optoma’s.

The two choice modes for unadjusted viewing would be Cinema and Reference.  Reference should be the technically more perfect of the two, but Cinema has more pop, and is right up there, in terms of accuracy.  Bright is brighter still, but not by that much, that most will need it.

But, on the other hand, we do provide the results of Mike’s calibration, so I would say to many of you:  “There are three User areas – dump our settings into one of them.  If that doesn’t look better (it should) than the default settings, then don’t use our settings.  That said, I’ve heard from many readers that Mike’s calibration numbers made for a real improvement, with their projectors.

All of our settings but the individual calibration of primary and secondary colors, are on the calibration page in this review, free for all to use if desired.   On the other hand, those individual color calibrations, which  I sometimes refer to as the last 5%, or last 10% of the whole calibration, along with CIE charts, other charts from the calibration, and additional comments from Mike, are on the Advanced Calibration page, which is only available to our subscribers.

For years I’ve included several images of Daniel Craig, as Bond, to demonstrate that great skin tones are perceived, not absolute.  The lighting conditions can make the same person’s face look pale and bluish (under fluorescent or mercury vapor lamps), or perhaps with a lot of orange if early morning or late sunlight lit.  Night scenes have their variations as well.  So, for consideration, here are a few very different colored skin tones – all from the same face.

The point is, if your projector is well calibrated (or comes close, right out of the box), all these skin tones will look very different, but they will also be believable, based on the lighting around his face!