BENQ W3000
AV projector
BenQ’s latest W3000 keeps a tight rein on accurate colour display, with sensible defaults.
DLP remains the projection technology preferred by BenQ, one of the major international producers of all manner of projectors — for business, education, gaming... and naturally the company does not neglect the home, with several models, some very competitively priced. Its latest mid-price unit is the W3000, which sports a full-HD resolution and a proper Rec. 709 colour mode. Equipment What is Rec. 709? It’s worth knowing about, especially as BenQ goes to the trouble of quality control checks on each individual W3000 as it leaves the production line — see our panel overleaf for an explanation of this colour space (and SoundOff on p76, too).
Apart from that, the projector covers a fair amount of familiar territory. It is a smallish unit, finished mostly in white and grey. The lens is offset to one side. The controls are on the top and easily accessible. All lens adjust- ments are manual. As for the DLP tech, BenQ doesn’t identify which Digital Micromirror Device it employs. All we know is that it is a single chip of 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution. A 260W lamp powers the unit, and the colour is managed by means of a six-window colour wheel with a standard RGBRGB sequence, running at six times normal speed. Unlike most of BenQ’s lesser models, the projector includes a frame-interpolation motionsmoothing system.
It has a couple of small speakers built in, should someone wish to use it sans sound system, but as always, of course, a big picture deserves big sound, so we’d recommend a proper (preferably multichannel) sound system. In addition to the audio inputs there are two HDMI, plus component video, composite video, and computer-style RGB. One of the HDMI inputs supports MHL, a way of connecting some Android phones, though MHL seems to be an increasingly defunct ‘standard’, thanks to ongoing incompatibilities. The last couple
of Samsung phones have dropped support completely, although premium HTC and LG phones apparently still work with MHL.
The projector comes with respectable 1.6-to-1 zoom range in the lens, and both horizontal and vertical lens shift. It is a little shorter in throw than the average AV projector. For a 100-inch (2.54-metre) screen the projector needs to be located between 2.546 and 4.118 metres from the screen. The lens shift is fairly modest in the amount of adjustment available. The maximum vertical shift is one eighth of the screen height — that’s 296mm for a 100-inch screen — and the horizontal shift range is five per cent of the screen width, or 210mm for that 100-inch screen. Think of it as allowing fine tuning rather than offering much freedom in the placement of the projector.
BenQ has a wireless HD transmission option should circumstances making cabling difficult (of course, you’ll still need to give the W3000 power).
There is 3D here, but such is its declining appeal that eyewear for 3D is not included with the projector. Expect to pay $149 per pair for the active shutter glasses, the kind where you have to charge them. They only weighed 33 grams and were comfortable to wear. The projector incorporates a 3D sync emitter which bounces its IR signal from the screen back to the glasses. But there’s a sync connection as well so you can attach an external 3D sync emitter if needed to deal with unusual room geometries. Performance Ceiling mounting was easy thanks to the light weight of the projector and the sensible placement of its mounting points. I barely had to tighten the universal joint of my ceiling pedestal to hold the projector firmly in position, and happily this left the projector within the distance from which the lens-shift feature could precisely position the image on screen. As usual with DLP, focus was very easy to achieve, and of course there was no colour misalignment since all colours came from the same panel.
On that subject, I’m happy to report that there was just about no rainbow effect, just one very brief appearance once in the several weeks of use, which is effectively zero. I’m quite sensitive to the effect so it should trouble no-one.
The first time you start up the projector it offers a simplified control menu — indeed a bit too simplified for my taste, but it’s easy enough to find the switch to the ‘Advanced’ menu, which is sensibly organised in BenQ’s standard way.
The default ‘Picture Mode’ setting was ‘Cinema (Rec.709)’. There was no ‘Standard’ or ‘Normal’ mode, but there were ‘Bright’, ‘Vivid’, ‘Game’ and two ‘User’ modes. (There’s also a 3D mode for when you’ve got one of them running.)
Picture mode settings labelled ‘Cinema’ on both TVs and projectors seem, in most cases, to employ a bunch of settings chosen by someone with iconoclastic tastes in colour, resulting in significant divergences from what the picture ought to look like. I normally use ‘Standard’ or ‘Normal’ as my base line.
However the ‘Rec. 709’ tuning changed all that. In all respects but two, this setting was spot on according to various test patterns. The black and end whites of the scale were properly set. The grey scale was even. The colours were accurate. One of the two imperfections was on that greyscale. On one almost-white grey bar there was a very slight mauve shift. Obviously this ought not be there, but it was completely absent in all actual program material, including the several black and white movies I enjoyed with this projector. (Black and white movies and test patterns, incidentally, tend to be more susceptible to the rainbow effect than colour ones, so their near complete absence was all the more impressive.)
The other imperfection was my usual bugbear: the sharpness control. But I didn’t even notice this at first. I’ve mentioned this with regard to other recent BenQ projectors — it seems the company has its own unique processing system for sharpness, and this somehow manages to avoid the edge contrast enhancement that results in ghosting. It actually does just sharpen.
Not to say that’s necessarily a good idea. It introduced jagged edges to what had previously been smooth diagonals and curves. That said, applying a little of this was occasionally useful in making the image easier on the eye without creating obvious distortion.
While on the subject of processing, the ‘Low’ setting for the ‘Motion Enhancer’ (that is, the frame interpolation system for smoothing motion) was pretty respectable. It seemed to generate only one intermediate frame on 1080p/24 content, so it left a little residual judder on the worst scenes, while still improving clarity significantly, and leaving no visible distortion. The two higher settings made the motion silky smooth, but also resulted in the appearance of processing artefacts.
In ‘Cinema (Rec.709)’ picture mode this Motion Enhancer was off by default. We like that. This mode seems to be intended as an almost laboratory setting, showing you what’s in the source and nothing else (aside from the default sharpness enhancement). We like that too.
The black levels were reasonable for a DLP projector without any kind of dynamic iris, but they won’t win any class-leading prizes for the projector.
The 3D performance was simply magnificent. You will need a dark room though. BenQ seems to have tuned the active shutter system to make sure there is absolutely no leakage of any content intended for one eye through the closed shutter for the other. While DLP pixels switch effectively instantaneously, the eyewear shutters are LCD and so take time to open and close. By keeping them closed for a millisecond or two longer over the left/right image switch, some brightness is traded off for perfect crosstalk performance. I think it was worthwhile. The 3D depth was excellent and not once was there any distraction by content that wasn’t supposed to be there.
The latency measurements had me scratching my head. I first checked them with a sound-sync test pattern and got a result of maybe 120 milliseconds delay in ‘Cinema (Rec.709)’ mode, and perhaps 50 milliseconds delay in ‘Game’ mode. I went to more precisely measure them, some days later, and got 129.3 milliseconds... for both. The former was using a 1080p/24 signal, the latter with 1080i/60. I tried changing inputs with no change in the result. So I switched the projector off while in ‘Game’ mode and then switched it back on, and got 79.2 milliseconds ... for both modes. Very confusing. Either way, this isn’t communicated via auto lipsync over HDMI so you’ll need to apply a manual delay to your home theatre receiver. And if 79.2ms is the game mode delay, that’s a bit on the slow side for game play. Conclusion Nonetheless, with the W3000, BenQ has delivered a mid-priced projector with assured colour performance, excellent 3D and generally fine overall performance.