Projector Reviews

Setup & Tests
Aligning the image with the screen was easy thanks to the leveling feet, lens-shift controls, and motorized zoom and focus. The best focus I could obtain was just a tad less sharp than the other projectors I've seen—I could barely discern individual pixels when I was a couple of inches away from the screen. This was no doubt due to Smooth Screen.

Looking at a white crosshatch on black, chromatic convergence was quite good over most of the screen. Only the lower-left corner showed significant green and red fringing, and only in the vertical direction.

The closest I could get to a D65 grayscale without calibration was a bit on the green side, but minor tweaks put it right in the pocket. Likewise, color temperature tracked a bit low before calibration, but it fell in line easily, and it was very flat across the brightness range.

Starting with the HQV Benchmark DVD at 480i, detail was very good for a standard-def source. Jaggies were virtually non-existent on the rotating and oscillating bars, but the waving flag had some obvious jaggies between the red and white stripes. The NR (noise-reduction) control seemed to do almost nothing, and the MPEG NR control didn't do much either, except at the highest setting, which blurred the detail significantly. The processor picked up 3:2 pulldown in less than a second, and 2:2 video looked great.

Turning to HQV Benchmark on HD DVD at 1080i, the NR control was slightly effective at +1 but no more at higher values, and MPEG NR had no visible effect. The video resolution-loss test was solid as a rock, though the low- and mid-frequency horizontal bursts had a slight cyan tint, and the high-frequency horizontal burst was almost completely rolled off.

Things weren't quite as solid in the film resolution-loss test, which showed a bit of flickering in the mid-frequency horizontal burst. Oddly, the low-frequency horizontal burst had that cyan tint when moving left, but not when moving right. I saw mild to moderate loss of detail in the pan across the bleachers. The Detail Clarity control seemed to make no difference in any of the motion tests.

The Spears and Munsil test HD DVD revealed that the projector picked up 3:2 at 1080i immediately. Moving on to the FPD Benchmark Blu-ray test disc, the resolution wedges in the monoscope pattern flickered like crazy at 1080p/24, even when the pattern was not moving, and when the pattern started scrolling, the motion was extremely jerky.

This problem vanished when the player was set to 1080p/60 or 1080i, but even then, the moving monoscope pattern certainly lost a fair amount of detail. The other moving resolution clips also lost quite a bit of detail, and the Detail Clarity control seemed to do nothing. Real-world film-based material had no problem with 1080p/24.