Canon LV-8310 Overall Color & Picture Quality

Posted on May 20, 2009 by Art Feierman

Canon LV-8310 Overall Color & Picture Quality

Connected via the analog VGA connection and fed it its native resolution (1280 x 800), the LV-8310 provided a colorful image in any image mode. As we have come to expect from Canon projectors, colors were deep and accurate. Unlike some of the competition, especially its DLP counterparts, the Canon LV-8310 maintained this color accuracy in even the brightest image modes. While the high brightness tended to wash out the colors somewhat, they still appeared natural, with yellows that actually looked yellow, not like mustard. Dropping down into Cinema or Video modes resulted in greater color depth and even more natural skin tones.

Let's start this page's images with a composite (cluttered) screen with lots of different things on it.

As you would expect from a company who is well respected for the cameras, photo presentations were particularly natural in appearance. As mentioned in the Setup and Menu section of this review, there are also plenty of adjustments available to dial in the picture quality.

Below are the same image showing the different preset modes.

Canon LV-8310 Overall Color & Picture Quality

Test Screen

Standard Mode

Presentation Mode

Cinema Mode

Video Mode

sRGB Mode

Canon LV-8310 Readability

The LV-8310 provided a sharp image at any resolution or aspect ratio. Using our usual spreadsheet with a range of text sizes and colors, there was no problem reading small (8 pt.) text on a 70” diagonal projected image. This level of readability was no less with white text-on-black and yellow text-on-dark blue backgrounds as well.

Click Image to Enlarge

With resolutions higher than its default 1280 x 800, the LV-8310 continued its sharp, readable performance. We tried switching to 1600 x 1200 and then 1600 x 900, to test its ability to scale and resize these higher resolutions and different aspect ratios. In each case, the displayed text looked essentially the same as it did at the LV-8310’s native resolution.

As we’ve noticed in recent reviews, compression and scaling technology has made some significant advances in recent years, such that quality display of non-standard resolutions and aspect ratios is becoming the rule rather than the exception. Unlike some LCD projectors, small text remained quite readable and there was no color separation or overlap. This speaks well for the Canon’s LCD panel convergence, as LCD projectors (which use separate panels for red, green and blue, and are usually pixel converged through a prism and the lens) can be prone to color fringing around smaller lettering.

Overall, Canon LV-8310 did an excellent job maintaining readability at any of the supported resolutions we tested.