Samsung SP-A600 Projector – Performance

Samsung SP-A600 Projector Brightness

User 1 seems to be virtually identical to Movie 1, with the small measured differences within the margin of error of our equipment.

Post calibration, Movie 1 (User 1) 715 lumens measured @6467K.

Switching to low lamp, brightness drops to 522 lumens, a larger than typical drop of 27% (20-25% is most typical). That percentage drop should hold in all modes.

With a measured 1017 lumens in Vivid mode, that puts the Samsung SP-A600 projector in the high side of average range for a bright mode for projectors in this price range. (Note, a few, however can get much brighter, such as the Epson Home Cinema 6100, which is about 50% brighter in best mode, even though the Epson is over 200 lumens less bright when comparing best modes.)

Going from mid-point on the zoom to full telephoto (it’s really not far to go) drops the brightness by about 12.5%. Going from mid-point to full wide angle increases brightness by 4.5%

To give you an idea of how the various “bright modes” compare, below are the same image shot with the same exposure. The first is Vivid, followed by Dynamic, then Standard:

Samsung SP-A600 Sharpness

Today’s single-chip DLP projectors are typically a little bit sharper than most 3LCD or LCoS projectors, due to the other technologies being 3 chip devices. And with that, there’s always at least a tiny bit of misconvergence to unsharpen the image. The Samsung SP-A600 projector, as expected, does provide a very sharp image.

Some DLP projectors are a touch sharper, and one recently reviewed, the Sharp XV-Z15000, seems similar, but the Z15000 has more trouble with edge to edge sharpness than most others. That is to say, both the Sharp and Samsung projectors will look very sharp at the point where you have focused it, but look towards the corners, and the SP-A600 would hold its sharpness better than the Sharp.