Vivitek Qumi Q7 LED Projector: Picture Quality

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Art Feierman

QUMI Q7 LED PROJECTOR PICTURE QUALITY: Color Modes, Presentation Quality Picture, Quality on Photos, video and Skin Tones

Qumi Q7 Picture Modes

The Q7 has six named picture modes, plus User, and User1. The image player here shows all of them in action, and you can read the mode name easily on the pull down menu captured in each photo.

Most of the modes have some pretty good color. Not exceptional color by any means, not serious home theater projector color, but more than adequate for all but the most color accuracy demanding presentations. Bright mode, is the brightest, and is apparently 'native" mode, with the usual helping of extra greens and yellows that is typical of the brightest mode on most projectors. Save Bright mode, for when you need every last lumen. Presentation, Game, TV sRGB, and User all look pretty good, but different. Some are cooler - more blue than others. In this sequence User1, the only one that lets you adjust Brilliant Color, is a bit red-orange, from my playing around. User1 provides the most ability to adjust the color, but it's a long way from ideal with the settings I was playing with.

If you are presenting, I suggest you look at your presentation (or part of it) though two or three of the modes, and pick the one you think is the best of the group.

There is one issue worth noting, and that is color saturation. First of all, LED light source projectors seem to tend to have a wide color space, and often look over saturated. Unfortunately, unless you are using low res sources, such as the composite video, you can't adjust the color saturation. As a result, the skin tones and colors in our test image all look at least a little over saturated. User1 also has access to a basic RGB adjustment, which I was playing with to reduce saturation, but I didn't spend enough time to reduce saturation and have good color in User1.

From a practical standpoint, a projector of this brightness, used for business, education, or even digital signage applications, is often dealing with ambient light, so a little extra saturation will help cut through the ambient. Still, I'd prefer to see a working Color Saturation control when working with HDMI and Computer sources.

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Presentation Quality Presenting with the Q7 Projector

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This folks is the bottom line: The images shown in this photo player demonstrate the consistently good quality image. They represent three of the different modes, so know that your presentation will be respectable. Some of these images were directly off of a laptop, but the pdf and the Word document were off of the image player (as is that coastline photo found elsewhere in this review.

Speaking of pdfs and Word documents, where often you find very small type and objects, don't forget that this Qumi projector has digital zoom so you can enlarge part of the image significantly for readability. I was using about half of the digital zoom's range to enlarge the center of the Word document (4th and 5th images in this player). Note that these were taken with a lot of ambient light present, and the exposure could have been less overexposed on especially the first of those Word docs. It was very readable in either size.

The last image is the "night train image" from the movie Casino Royale, which we use for observing black level performance and dark shadow detail. This only slightly overexposed image shows the letter boxes and other blacks as medium dark grays - very entry level on blacks, very good, but not exceptional shadow detail, both fine for business and basic entertainment use.

Color When Projecting Photos, Skin Tones, Videos

While none of the modes is near perfect, there are plenty of good choices. The image player below gives you a look at handling more color critical applications than say your favorite news website (although we have that covered as well). Need perfection, look elsewhere. Need to simply do a good job, the Q7 may be just what you are looking for.

As mentioned earlier, a little less saturated might be a good thing, but that's likely going to be most noticed if you are presenting content in a dark room.