Projector Reviews

Setup & Testing
The review unit had the 1.56-1.86 lens, and the projector was at its maximum throw distance of 142 inches in order to fill the screen height. The lens shift is manual and requires the included Allen wrench to adjust, which is somewhat awkward, though I suppose that once it's set, there's no need to access the controls, and the case can retain a clean, uncluttered look. Because I didn't test the anamorphic-lens option, I covered the unused sides of the 2.35:1 screen with black duvetyne cloth.

Contrast and Brightness were easy to set thanks to the Cine LED's ability to display above-white and below-black. I was surprised to discover that Sharpness could be set very high without much ringing, though high settings didn't seem to improve the sharpness much. Saturation and Hue are unavailable with the HDMI inputs, so the blue-only mode was not as useful as it could have been.

Usually, I find any sort of dynamic-contrast function to be obvious and distracting, but not with the Cine LED's DynamicBlack, which modulates the LED brightness according to the average picture level (APL) of the image, so I set it to its highest value for all watching. On the other hand, the projector's Adaptive Contrast function changed the colors a bit, and not in a good way, so I left that one off.

Looking at the HD Benchmark test disc, the Cine LED showed virtually no sign of rolloff at the highest resolution, and there was only slight chromatic aberration evident on crosshatch test patterns at the sides of the image. Both 2:2 and 3:2 deinterlacing were excellent, as was edge-adaptive deinterlacing. Standard-def deinterlacing was also very good—the edges of the safety glass in the hockey shots and the ship's rigging were essentially jaggie-free, though there were a few jaggies in the support lines of the Brooklyn Bridge as the camera zoomed out.

The new version of the HQV Benchmark Blu-ray told a similar story. Jaggies were non-existent, and the film and video resolution-loss tests looked excellent for the most part, though some resolution was lost in the pan across the bleacher seats, which happens with virtually all displays.

The new HQV Benchmark DVD at 480i also looked great on most tests, but overall detail in the scaled image was not the best I've seen. Interestingly, the projector's Noise Reduction control is calibrated in very fine steps, and it increments very slowly, making it difficult to compare "off" with moderate settings. It did seem to help some, but it also softened the image a bit.