Mitsubishi XL1550U Business Projector Review – Image Quality – 1

Posted on October 3, 2013 By Art Feierman

XL1550U Business projector: Sharpness and Handling of Non-Native Resolution Source Material

Beautiful. Feed the Mitsubishi XL1550U its native XGA signal, and it is razor sharp. (please note – again, all images below, were taken with full room lighting) In doing testing, I expect all projectors to do a great job though, when fed their native resolution. The real test is how they handle other resolutions. Now, first, the image above is an XGA signal, coming from my MacBook Pro. However, the MacBook Pro is a 1440×900 resolution device, it will output XGA – as you see above, but it resizes everything internally, so you are seeing the results of the Mac’s compression algorithms, which is why, when you click on the image above to look at the larger version, small type (10 point and below) has some issues – that’s the Mac, not the projector.

The three thumbnails below, when clicked upon, will bring up (left to right), XGA, WXGA (1280×800), and 1080p (1920×1080) large images. I was particularly impressed with the XL1550U’s ability to handle the top end HDTV resolution (1920×1080) without difficulty, locking on, and displaying it as well as one could expect from a projector whose native resolution has only about 40% the pixels of that high res. I probably should also point out that Mitsubishi doesn’t even claim to work with 1920×1080 (few do), but it did it just fine. Kudos! Bottom line: The Mitsubishi XL1550U, and, we assume, also the XL2550U, perform extremely well, in terms of native sharpness, and also the ability to handle much higher resolution sources, with very good compression technology.

Click Image to Enlarge

XGA

WXGA (1280x800)

1080p (1920x1080)

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Mitsubishi XL1550U Projector: Overall Picture Quality

Overall, I found no weaknesses in terms of the Mitsubishi projector’s ability to process images – be they data or video. The one shortfall is the low contrast ratio, which yield rather poor black level performance. Fortunately this is a non-issue for 99% of all business related presentations. It really only comes into play if you want to drag the Mitsubishi home for some movie watching.