Long life and happiness

BenQ continues its assault on the higher end of home cinema projection, with the LED-assisted Ultra-HD X12000.

It has only been a few months since we looked into BenQ’s W11000 Ultra HD front projector, and now there’s a competitor... also from BenQ. The X12000 Ultra HD projector. So what differs? What’s the same. Is the W11000 still available? Why does this one start with an X?

Equipment

Yes, the W11000 and the X12000 are both available. They are parallel models, with the W11000, at $7999, for the more budget-constrained purchaser. What are the differences? What are the similarities?

There’s an enormous amount of overlap. In practice, everything is the same on both models except the light source or lamp. The BenQ W11000 runs an ultra high pressure lamp. The X12000 goes to a newer, longer life, LED solution.

Specifically, it uses the Philips ColorSpark HLD LED. LED stands, of course, for Light Emitting Diode. And as we all know, over the years they’ve been able to manufacture increasingly bright ones. They are highly efficient, and therefore run cooler than standard filament-style lamps. HLD stands for High Lumen Density, to which I’ll return in a second. ColorSpark is, as far as I can tell, just a nifty name developed for marketing purposes. I like it, although there aren’t really any sparks involved (I’m pleased to report).

The problem with LEDs is that some colours can be made brighter than others. Red and blue LEDs of excellent capabilities are readily available to a company like Philips. But green presents a problem. A green LED cannot (yet, perhaps) be made to match the brightness of blue and red ones.

Easily solved, you’d think. Just use more of them! But more LEDs means more surface area, which means a physically larger light source. The ideal in a projector would be an infinitesimally small light source. With a large light source the optics just don’t work very well. That’s the significance of the HLD — High Lumen Density — part of the light source’s name. Sometimes the weakness of green LEDs is overcome by not using green LEDs at all, but instead using a blue laser to goad some phosphors into glowing sympathetically... in green. Philips’ twist on this is to use blue LEDs instead, and attach them to the side of a rod filled with the green glowing phosphors. The rod acts a kind of tunnel for the green light to emerge from its end with high intensity from a narrow surface. High Lumen Density achieved.

This lamp system runs cooler than regular lamps and is instant on and instant off (note: the projector itself is neither, since there’s more to a projector than just its lamp, but when it comes on it starts with the proper colour temperature and at full brightness). Importantly, it’s good for 20,000 hours of operation. You can do the figures yourself on your normal viewing schedule, but to give a general idea, if you spent one quarter of your life (six hours of every day) watching, you’d be able to watch it for nine years and a month and a half before hitting the limit.

The X12000 is a DLP projector, like the W11000, and looks pretty much like it. It has a similar set of inputs — HDMI and D-SUB15, with one HDMI supporting copy protected Ultra HD from Ultra HD Blu-ray players, and the other running to 1080p max. The other connections are all for control. There is no 3D support.

It’s a hefty thing weighing 18.5 kilograms, and it’s clearly well built. There’s vertical and horizontal lens shift and a 1.5:1 zoom — all manually adjusted, not powered. The range from the screen to produce a 100-inch (2.54 metre) image size is from three metres to fourand-half metres.

The digital micromirror device (DMD) employed in the projector is the same as that used in the W11000, with a grid of mirrors arrayed 2716 wide and 1528 tall. That comes to 4.15 megapixels, or half that needed for an individual pixel for each of the 8.3 million in an Ultra HD image. But by leveraging on the speed of DLP switching, the DMD uses a system called ‘XPR’ (‘eXpanded Pixel Resolution’) which employs an ‘optical actuator’ to shift the image diagonally rapidly between two positions so that it can deliver the other 4.15 million pixels, making up the 8.3 million total. Performance The resolution performance was pretty much identical to that of the W11000, which isn’t surprising given their similarity. As with the W11000, the X12000 manages to reproduce each and every one of the 8+ million pixels discretely from the half-resolution DMD, thanks to the XPR dodge, albeit imperfectly. My test pattern showed each resolution line sketched out, but also shows inconsistent line widths. I’m fairly confident that this makes no practical or visible difference in performance compared to a projector capable of more cleanly differentiating each pixel.

And the results pretty much speak for themselves. Watching a range of Ultra HD movies and digital test clips, the projector produced an amazingly sharp and detailed picture, even beyond that of regular Blu-ray. At least, that’s the sense I got. It’s kind of hard to find comparison scenes for which one can say ‘look at this’ and then show a clear, objective difference between the regular Blu-ray and the Ultra HD Blu-ray. It’s more a sense that when watching Blu-ray content there’s a loss of substance just on the edge of perception that just isn’t present with the Ultra HD Blu-ray version.

So here, with scene after scene in movie after movie, there was a superb transparency. Indeed it’s to a level that could be uncomfortably revealing at times.

For example, the first time I watched the superb X-Men: Days of Future Past, it was on Blu-ray with a full-HD front projector. It’s a gorgeously shot movie, with brilliant, realistic special effects, including street scenes from the 1970s. But when I rewatched the Ultra HD Blu-ray version with this projector, the New York street through Wolverine’s window was noticeably less convincing. Thanks to the clarity of delivery with this projector, it looked as though it had been digitally inserted into a window frame. Which indeed it had been.

There’s no obvious setting, but it is possible to switch off the XPR. Poring over the manual, I discovered that the ‘Silence’ picture mode, as its name suggests, is designed to reduce the sound level made by the projector. So it switches off things which might make sound, or which generate heat which might require more fan cooling.

XPR turns out to be one of those. And you do not want to switch off XPR. The native resolution of the DMD does not match any

‘XPR’ (‘eXpanded Pixel Resolution’) employs an ‘optical actuator’ to shift the image diagonally rapidly between two positions.”

present home video format, so everything has to be scaled by some weird multiple to fit. It doesn’t matter much with SD material, but any full-HD content is going to lose clarity.

Of course, there’s more to projector performance than just resolution. With black levels and colour, things were interesting. I spent a while using the DCI-P3 picture mode. DCI stands for Digital Cinema Initiative, and P3 is the wider colour gamut it strives for. My understanding is that the projector does not support WCG signals, so in this mode it takes normal signals and takes its best guess at what they’d be like with a wider colour gamut. The results were bold and often entrancing, but I ultimately abandoned it because they weren’t accurate, pushing too much red and general richness into the picture. ‘Cinema’ mode proved to be far more accurate, giving a subtle and natural picture, with appropriate rather than overblown richness.

Black levels fell onto the correct side of the threshold in which blacks look truly black unless you’re peering at them critically. There are projectors that can go way blacker, but in normal use you will tend not to notice unless you’re looking for it.

However there were some notable weaknesses, which were to do with an incompatibility between the XPR pixel shifting and some kinds of video. The whole system has been designed around and locked into 60 hertz operation. Getting those shifted pixels to land just so in order to create 8.3 million pixels out of half that number is an engineering triumph based on astonishingly precise timing. Trying to turn this into a multi-frame-rate system would seem to be beyond current engineering state of the art. So 60 frames per second it is.

Well, that has implications. When you’re watching 24 frames per second content, this projector repeats one frame, then repeats the next frame twice, and repeats the third frame once, the fourth frame twice, and so on. In other words, the incoming 24p frames enter the projector as 1,2, 3, 4, 5 etc, and are shown as 1,1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5 etc. That uneven 2:3:2:3 cadence is visible on the screen as slightly jerky motion and camera pans. This is all the more obvious thanks to the very virtues of the projector. DLPs switch extremely quickly, so there’s no projector-induced motion blur, and that makes uneven frame delivery more obvious. And, of course, UHD. The picture is sharper, so the differences between each frame are that much more clearly inscribed on the screen.

So, yes, it’s a bit like going back to the first couple of Blu-ray players (and HD DVD players) which were incapable of delivering 24p, and thus produced an unexpected judder with a lot of material.

And as for Australian TV and DVD content (along with the occasional 1080i/50 Blu-ray), the judder is worse, because the 50 incoming frames are converted to 60 display frames by repeating every fifth frame once. As for deinterlacing 1080i/50 and 576i/50 inputs, results were unpredictable and generally unpleasant. You should deliver 1080p/50 and 576p/50 content to the projector.

Conclusion

The BenQ X12000 is really quite the bargain for the technology here, when native 4K projectors remain, even with a solid-state lamp, two or three times as much. If you can stretch to this kind of price but not much further, find a shop that sells the X12000 and see for yourself how good Ultra HD front projection can look.