BENQ W5700 AV projector
Last issue we enjoyed the entry-level $2499 W2700 from BenQ. Now we step up to the $3999 W5700 — what are the gains?
After a rave review for BenQ’s W2700 last issue, what’s to be gained by moving up to the higher W5700, given both models have won EISA 2019/20 Awards, as detailed this issue (p21/22)?
So far BenQ’s UltraHD projector offerings have been at either end of the sales spectrum. There have been the premium models, up near the $10,000 price point, and the budget models, down somewhere near a quarter of that price. Now BenQ is plugging that gap with the BenQ W5700 at $3999, and in several ways is a marked upgrade over the latest budget model, the W2700.
Equipment
This projector clearly looks like a home theatre projector, not just a tarted-up business or education model. It’s wide. It’s black. It’s reasonably heavy (6.5kg). Not imposing, but certainly substantial.
It is based around DLP technology, of course, this being BenQ. It uses the 0.47-inch Digital Micromirror Device with XPR. This is a 1080p panel which delivers four flashes per frame, shifted to very slightly different positions, allowing it to build up four times the native resolution of the panel.
Unlike some other pixel-shifting projectors, this one is locked into this mode the whole time. Because the DMD is so small, the grid patterns between the pixels occupy a larger proportion of the picture. Were it to run at 1080p, the screen-door effect would likely be intolerable. But because of the relatively wide blanks between the native pixels, there is less overlap of the UHD pixels.
The projector is rated at an impressive 1800 lumens output and 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut. Given that’s the standard employed by modern cinematographers, this projector ought to deliver every colour in the content. It is also rated at a contrast ratio of 100,000:1. The lamp is rated at up to 10,000 hours of operation in Eco mode, and 4000 hours in Normal (ie. full output) mode.
It has considerable flexibility in installation, with a 1.6-to-1 zoom range and both horizontal and vertical lens shift. To fill a 100-inch (2.54 metre) 16:9 screen the projector needs to be between 3.0 metres and 4.83 metres away. All the optical controls are manual.
The projector does support 3D if you purchase the optional eyewear. The remote has sufficient power to control the projector by bouncing its IR signal from the projection screen.
Performance
I loved so much about this projector. I loved the utter absence of rainbow effect. I loved the strong yet also subtle colours. But most of all, I loved the impressive black levels that made the colour possible. Some BenQ projectors of the past have been a bit iffy on this front, tending towards a dark grey rather than a subjectively fulfilling level of black. There was nothing like that here. This projector firmly delivered blacks well beyond the point where they were convincing.
What more can you want? Well, if we want to get really fussy, we’d want discrimination between black levels all the way down to 0.000 nits. With HDR UltraHD Blu-ray discs, the unit automatically switched to HDR picture mode (and can’t be switched to something different, even if you want to). The Sony UltraHD test patterns in this mode (hit 7 6 6 9 on your remote when on the main menu of a Sony UHD disc) showed a clearly different level of black between 0.1 nits and 0.01 nits. But from 0.01 nits down to 0.000, blacks were crushed. At those low levels, the crushing doesn’t really translate to much loss of detail in dark scenes on UHD.
At the other end, there was also some discrimination between 1000 and 1100 nits. Above that, all brightnesses were one.
Most of my viewing was with regular Blu-ray and, especially, Ultra-HD Blu-ray. The re-issue of The Fifth Element in this format looked gorgeous, though also an example of how this level of clarity can show up earlier productions; here it made much of the 1990s SFX look a bit too artificial.
Perhaps one reason for the excellent look is that each projector is individually calibrated in the factory. Each comes with a ‘Calibration Report’ showing the colour gamut it achieves, and how well it tracks the colour gamut curve.
With 50 hertz content, the results were so-so. The main weakness was deinterlacing with both 576i/50 and 1080i/50 content. The projector seemed to be locked into video-mode deinterlacing, or flipped over into it so readily it was hard to tell the difference. That meant that all moving content on the screen was delivered at half resolution. In addition to being soft, there were marked moire patterns over regular, repeated close-to-horizontal lines.
There were no settings we could find in the projector for specifically choosing film or video mode deinterlacing.
The solution is, of course, to use a source device which does a good job on the progressive scan conversion before sending it to the BenQ. Things were much better when I set my Ultra-HD Blu-ray player to do that.
I should make clear, too, that the 50Hz to 60Hz conversion judder to which some earlier DLP/XPR projectors were subject was entirely absent with this one. Likewise for 24 frames per second content being output at 60Hz, which we think was an early limitation of the DLP chip in question. It seems that BenQ (and/or Texas Instruments) now has the projector engine and the pixel shifting stuff all able to run at the correct frequency. In this regard the specifications say that the colour wheel spins at 120, 100 or 96 hertz, so presumably those figures correspond to 30/60 hertz content, 25/50 hertz and 24 hertz respectively.
Making UHD from Full-HD
As usual with UltraHD devices, I went to my Ultra-HD test pattern to make sure it was delivering what was promised. Why a test pattern? Because despite some ‘night and day difference’ claims for 4K, there aren’t many real-world movies in which the higher resolution of UHD is clearly obvious, at least compared to full-HD which has been skilfully scaled up to UHD. Here at Sound+Image we like to nail down things, where possible, beyond mere impressions. The test pattern (which you’ll see in all our projector and some TV reviews) features four groups of horizontal lines and four of vertical lines. The precise size of the pattern is 3840 pixels wide by 2160 pixels tall. At the centre of the pattern all those lines intersect. Most of the lines are separated from the other lines by a single pixel width. One vertical group and one horizontal group of lines is black, one group is red, one is green and one is blue.
When reproduced on a modern Ultra-HD TV, each line is displayed cleanly on a column or row of pixels on the TV, cleanly separated from the others by white.
Why am I going on about this? Because as originally delivered, the projector was unable to deliver any more resolution than full-HD. All the lines that were supposed to be separated by a one UHD pixel-width of white space were merged into one solid block. The lines that were separated by two pixels-width of white space were properly separated.
That was when I was delivering the signal from a UHD Blu-ray player. Indeed, I tried two different ones, and double-checked them with an LG OLED TV to confirm that they were outputting their signals correctly.
Then when I plugged in a USB stick bearing the patterns (there are two USB sockets on the projector), it played them properly. There were discernible lines in all eight groups, stronger in some than in others.
I know from checking other projectors using the 0.47-inch DMD with XPR that they aren’t as cleanly separated as they are on a TV, and these were of roughly similar quality to other projectors using this technology. They were clearly there when the pattern was supplied via a direct USB connection — but not when the identical signal was fed via HDMI.
This turned into bit of a saga (about which more next issue), where we went back and forwards with BenQ until finally a new firmware installation fixed the problem. I’m happy to report that the projector was then able to deliver UltraHD resolution with the HDMI inputs as well as USB. We assume BenQ will make the fixed firmware, which was privately delivered to us, publicly available for those whose W5700 was purchased prior to this discovery.
4K motion enhancement
The unit has a ‘4K Motion Enhancement’ function, which I take to be BenQ’s version of judder reduction/motion smoothing. This did have me puzzled. It has three choices of ‘level’, but the ‘Low’ and ‘Middle’ settings did nothing that I could see, even with regular Blu-ray fed at 1080p (and things were the same with 2160p content). The ‘High’ setting looked like it usefully halved the judder in the most egregious scenes, such as the Chicago flyover 50 minutes into The Fugitive, or as two motorcycles in the far distance are tracked at 19:55 in Easy Rider.
But I’d still suggest strongly that you leave this off. First, it tends to generate heat-haze distortion. Second, it seemed to hurt 50Hz content. The edges of moving objects were sometimes fuzzy, sometimes showing incipient combing as though there was some kind of mismatch between fields.
That function is a little buried in the menu structure. Go to the Picture menu, choose Advanced, then choose Cinema Master. You’ll find it there.
Conclusion
The BenQ W5700 is now, I think, BenQ’s best UltraHD projector yet. The good black performance, installation flexibility, full DCI-P3 colour coverage and true UltraHD resolution are remarkable in view of the selling price. Stephen Dawson