The first thing I did was to calibrate the projector. I plugged
in my signal generator and setup my probe. I zero’d
all the factory settings and set the color temp to Normal.
After running through the basic contrast and brightness adjustments,
I tested the grayscale. Out of the box it was about 8196k
(x=.283 and y= .333). This is not uncommon with BenQ I have
found. They need a decent amount of adjustment out of the
box to get them to NTSC standards. I went into the service
menu and started my adjustments. I was able to get from 100
to 50IRE adjusted well, but at 40IRE it started to spike upwards.
No matter how much I tried to adjust it in the service menu
bias controls, I couldn’t get it flat. The red needed
more, and as I adjusted it in the service menu, the measurement
only went up slowly, but my background turned to an obvious
redish tint. So I experimented and reset the service menu.
I then went into the standard user menu and tried them there.
Success! Here I was able to get the grayscale to track very
well from 20IRE to 90IRE, with only slight spikes at 10 and
100 (not uncommon). I then went in and measured the primaries/secondaries.
Here I was pleasantly surprised. The green and red were slightly
oversaturated, but blue and cyan were spot on. Yellow and
magenta were skewed a bit (yellow to green and magenta to
blue), but with the 3D color adjustments I was able to get
them all to the correct points.
After I was done tweaking the unit, I threw up some images.
The first thing I did was HD DVD. I noticed was that the unit
produced a very clean image. In fact, it almost didn’t
look like DLP to me because there was very little noise in
the image. However, this also made for a less crisp image
that often is associated with DLP. Not to say the image wasn’t
sharp, it just didn’t have the typical DLP look to it
(take that for what it’s worth). In my preferred settings
for iris and lamp (250 watt with iris about 90% to full),
I found that the black levels very satisfactory and on par
with what most current DLP’s have. It also had good
brightness at this setting (I use a 103” diag. Vutec
Silverstar and it was plenty bright). It is not by any means
what I would consider a light-cannon, but for most theater
applications with good light control, it can easily handle
a 110”ish screen. If one desires a larger screen than
that, or has ambient light to contend with, I would recommend
getting a higher gain screen to help out in that regard, and
possibly running the iris more open (again, sacrificing the
contrast somewhat). The colors were very accurate with the
reds being more crimson in color than orangish, and the green
not having the typical limegreen color that DLP’s often
do. This is partly helped with the 8 segment color wheel.
I found saturation was a bit thin, and I found I had to increase
the color adjustment a bit in order to get a richer, more
colorful image. The unit has good shadow detail, I would say
slightly above average for this level projector. The black
levels weren’t buried at all either. The processing
on the unit was better than I would expect. There was little
edge enhancement, and it was able to handle about anything
I could throw at it. I did attempt to plug my Dragonfly processor
into it via 1080p60, but the BenQ wouldn’t take that
signal through HDMI. It does take 1080p24sf, but not 1080p60
(at least through HDMI).
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