NEC NP-UM330W Projector Review - Performance

Brightness

The NEC NP-UM330W is specified by NEC to have 3300 lumens at it brightest setting.  When set to either "High-Bright" or "Presentation" picture mode and with all of the other picture settings at the factory default, I confirmed the accuracy of the published specification.  More specific, I measured very near to 3350 lumens in either of these the two brightest picture modes.  The "Movie", "Graphics", "sRGB" and "DICOM SIM" picture modes all measured a little over 3000 lumens with the factory default picture settings.   Specifically:  Movie (3171 lumens), Graphics (3053 lumens), sRGB (3288 lumens) and DICOM SIM (3053 lumens).  The "Video" mode had a somewhat lower brightness at a measured 2580 lumens with factory default settings.  Next I used a video test disc in my Blu-ray player to set the projector's contrast and brightness controls to obtain reference white and black levels respectively.  I found that the factory default contrast setting resulted in "white crush" (i.e., where the brighter shades of white all appears at the same full white value) and when I lowered the contrast setting to obtain a more-or-less correct reference white level, the measured lumens out of the projector dropped, as would be expected.  With these adjustments the light output in "High-Bright" picture mode dropped to a still bright 2700 lumens and "Movie" picture mode light output decreased to 2020 lumens.

The above lumens values are for when the projector is operated in "Normal" lamp mode.  Changing to "Eco" decreased the light output by about 40%.

My measurements for brightness uniformity showed very good results with only about a 15% light drop-off between the center of the image and the corners.

Noise

The NEC NP-UM330W is specified to produce a noise level of 35 dB in normal lamp mode and 28 dB in Eco mode.  These values are typical for this class of projector.  While the noise level, especially with the lamp operating in normal mode, is certainly audible, it should not be distracting when this projector is being used in a conference room or class room environment.  Changing to the "Eco" mode resulted in a noticeable decrease in noise level and to a level similar to that from a typical home theater projector when such a projector is operating in its normal mode.

The NP-UM330W has a 16 watt built-in speaker that produces adequate volume to not only overcome the projector's fan noise but also is sufficient to provide the audio in a classroom or moderate size conference room.  As is expected from such modest size built-in speakers, there is no bass but it still works well for voice narrations and background music.

Networking