Projector Reviews - General Performance 4

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Art Feierman

Calibration

I've included a couple of pictures of the measurements, but here's the long and short of it. If production units perform like this out of the box, this projector is truly ready to go, without any tweaking, (except slightly on brightness and contrast). The first image shot off of my laptop shows out of the box settings (Cinema mode, Economic - low - power, color temperature T4) at 50 IRE (medium gray). The second image is at 80IRE (light gray)

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For movie watching a projector should have a color temperature of 6500K. (Since projector lamps are more like 10,000K, projectors measure much brighter in their brightest modes than when color is properly set for viewing. That's one of the reasons why you usually read that home theater projectors in their best modes typically produce less than 40% of their claimed brightness.)

Color will not be consistant over the brightness range - that is, if you project a white image, it might have a slight warm shift to red, while a medium gray might shift slightly to blue, etc. So there is always variation as you measure from full white (100 I.R.E) down to the dark grays (30 I.R.E in my case, due to limits of my equipment).

The W100 digital projector's performance in Cinema mode (and low power - which can also affect the color slightly) was about as close to perfect as any projector out of the box:

Cinema Mode
IRE 100:	6596K
IRE 80:	6516K
IRE 50:	6539K
IRE 30:	6323K

Image Noise

All DLP projectors produce some motion noise in dark areas, the BenQ as expected had some. At no point, unless you like standing 3 feet from a 100" screen should it be something that you notice and bothers you. If it does, you really need to be looking at much higher end projectors.