BenQ W500 DLP Home Theater Projector Review – General Performance 4

The W500 was easy to adjust the grayscale balance, and should be equally easy for those of you using a basic calibration disk. For my test unit, a I ended up with Brightness set to 51, and Contrast 54 (never was quite happy with the contrast setting, due to the loss of dark shadow detail, but more on that later). The default Color (saturation) is 60, and I found that to be a little over saturated, and for much of my viewing had it down around 52. Black levels were set to 7.5 IRE, which produced that loss of very dark shadow detail, but the 0.0 IRE setting seemed a bit to bright in dark areas, and letterboxes. Overall, the default Cinema preset was a little cool, with white measuring 7167K (6500K is ideal for movies). By using the color management, for a quick grayscale calibration, I adjusted the separate Red, Green, and Blue controls for both Gain and Offset, and ended up with these settings:

Overall, that is still a bit cool, and further tweaking should get it closer to ideal, but these temperatures are close enough to be considered overall, to produce good colors. On the other hand, dark gray images still managed to have a slight redish cast to them, as noted in the Image Quality section, with the black and white image from Phantom of the Opera. Also from that disk, the very, very dark cavern scene also projects too much red, compared to most projectors. If you are using Eco-mode, as is common, the lamp temperature measures a bit cooler, so, at 100 IRE, before the adjustment, Eco-mode (Cinema) produced 7318K, about 150K cooler than full power. Auto Iris: I preferred the Auto Iris on, as it dramatically reduced black levels, but, as noted took its toll in shadow detail in very dark areas. The pairing with a white surface screen, rather than the Firehawk that I did most of my watching on, however produces a more enjoyable image to watch, although a loss of shadow detail is still evident.