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Mitsubishi XL1550U - and XL2550U Business Projectors Review - General Performance

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Art Feierman

Mitsubishi XL1550U Menus

The Mitsubishi main menu consists of five small icons in the upper left hand of the screen (it can be moved). Each opens one of the major menus. Overall, I only have one real issue with the menu system, and that is that when you have a feature, that has, say, four or five options, you normally have to toggle through them one at a time. I prefer a next level menu. That way, you see all the choices and pick the one you want.

To work the controls, use the left and right arrows (right for up). That will let you increase, for example, the contrast, one step at a time.

The Color Enhancer mode, gives you four preset choices or a User defined. Most manufacturers tend to just call this option "Image mode" or Color Mode", so Mitsubishi gets a creativity award for cooking up "Color Enhancer". The four presets are: Presentation, Standard, Theater, and sRGB. Presentation is the punchiest, and best for presenting with significant ambient light. Standard seems to provide a slightly more natural image. Theater of course, is optimized for movies and videos, and is a little less bright. sRGB, designed for color matching, is, well, sRGB, which brooks no changes, so when in sRGB, you will not be able to affect changes to Color (saturation), Tint, Color Temperature, or the Wall Screen mode. There is an Auto option, which, ideally selects the best of these four modes, depending on the input source.

Lastly there is a User defined area, which offers a tremendous amount of flexibility. When you choose User, you now have three gamma choices - Dynamic, Natural, and Detail. In addition you have Color Saturation (RGB) and Color Tint (also RGB).

The Color Temp control offers three presets: Standard, Low (warm), and High (cool). In addition, you get separate controls for red, green and blue, for both contrast and brightness. This provides exceptional color tuning capabilities, on par with most home theater projectors, nevermind business projectors where color controls are often rather limited.

Image menu

advanced

installation

feature

signal

information

Mitsubishi XL1550U Projector - Remote Control

The Mitsubishi remote is a throwback - in that it is a common layout that was very popular for many years. This isn't a compliment, nor a criticism, just an observation. Let me start by saying that the XL1550U and XL2550U offer full remote mousing. That is, in addition to connecting the input source, if you connect the USB cable between projector and computer, you can control the mousing functions - moving the cursor, left and right mouse button functions, and page up, page down, all from the Mitsubishi's remote control. On the remote, there is a trigger on the bottom (one reason I call this a throwback remote - this was far more common five or even 10 years ago, than today). That trigger is the left mouse button in terms of functionality. There is a right mouse button on the top of the remote. A nice sized disc pad on the remote allows you to move the cursor fairly quickly with reasonable precision. Lastly there are a page up, page down, home (beginning of the presentation) and End (end of the presentation) buttons on the remote. Ok, time to quickly run through some of the other many buttons on this Mitsubishi remote control. From the top - on the left is the Power switch (once on, twice off). It also doubles as the source selector for the DVI input. The remainder of the top two rows are direct source controls, so you can jump to whichever source you want. On rows three and four, there are four buttons that handle remote mousing, as previously mentioned, and to the left of them is an Auto Position (auto setup) for a computer input, and right below it, with an orange border, is the button for the built in Laser pointer. This is nice. It seems to me that far fewer remote controls today have laser pointers, than did a few years ago. I think this may have to do with liability - especially since a significant number of folks apparently take a projector home from work for an occasional movie or sporting event. And taking it home, often means kids, and kids and lasers make for great liability issues.

OK, continuing, next are the four arrow keys in diamond layout, with the disc pad for mouse control in the center. Below all of that on the left is the menu button, the R-Click (right mouse button), and on the right, the Enter button. The next row has but one button - for keystone adjustment. The lower three rows, offer two buttons for volume (up/down), Aspect ratio select, the wall screen menu (to set the color of the wall), Expand - which provides digital zoom in capabilities (you can use the + / - (volume) buttons to zoom in or zoom out), and the arrow keys to move around the image to view the area you are zooming.

 

These projectors also have Picture in Picture, which, to turn on, occupies the right button on the second last row. You can have an analog or digital computer input selected, and using PIP, open a window to display either standard video or S-video. Component video will not work with PIP, nor can you select two computer signals - too bad!!!

Finally, the last row. CE (highlighted in yellow) is the Color Enhancer button (if you recall from the Menus - this lets you choose between Presentation, Standard, Theater, sRGB, and User). There is also a Mute button, and finally a freeze frame button labeled Still.

That wraps it up, except to say that the remote seems to have especially good range. I was easily able to use remote mousing functions bouncing the image off the screen, with a total range of over 20 feet, and in my (larger) theater room was able to get just about 30 feet using the various controls.

Bottom line - a very good remote!

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