That said, focus wasn’t quite as razor sharp as DLP. Again, there was no colour shift on any of the test patterns, nor any visible fringes around white-on-black objects. DLP uses just one reflective chip of course. In the end we opted to leave the dynamic iris off completely, and still found the picture very satisfying, and with better blacks than you’ll see in most modern cinemas.Ī potential weakness of LCD vs DLP is colour misalignment, because the three colours are coming from three different sources which must be perfectly placed with regard to each other to make all three colours arrive in the same places on the screen. Blacks were noticeably deeper than we’d normally expect from a projector at this price point, and better than (dare we say it?) similarly-priced DLPs. The native contrast ratio of the projector was fairly good. Set to ‘Fast’ mode, there was a quiet but audible chittering as it flickered rapidly to the appropriate size on close to a frame-by-frame basis. There was another noise, though, from the dynamic iris, which adjusts the overall picture brightness by narrowing during darker moments. The ‘Eco’ setting - which has the nice effect of really extending lamp life - brought down fan speed quite a lot, making it mostly unnoticeable during normal watching. Initially we also ran with the default ‘Normal’ lamp setting… but with the projector not far from the viewing seat, the fan was a little louder than we would have liked. Normally we’d go straight to standard ‘Cinema’, but there was a pleasing clarity imposed on the picture with this mode, so we tended to stick with it. The default picture setting was ‘Bright Cinema’. Likewise, there was little or no artificial sharpening or edge enhancement in place by default, allowing for smooth diagonals, indeed a smooth picture in general. In addition to being properly calibrated as to brightness, there was also no colour shift in any of the greys. Perhaps things are a bit more basic than the considerable massaging many TVs these days give a signal, but it nevertheless gave confidence that what it was delivering was pretty much what was in the signal, subject only to hardware limitations.
Likewise for full black and blacker than black. A grey-scale test pattern was properly shown with full white and whiter than white indistinguishable from each other. Out of the box most of the settings were pretty much spot on.