REVIEW: BenQ W1080ST+ home theatre projector
Home theatre projectors usually go at one end of a room while the screen upon which they project images go at the other end. With a zoom lens, a projector would typically be located at least three metres from a 100 inch screen, and perhaps as much as five.
That can mean having to ceiling mount it, since you may want to sit closer to the screen than the projector.
A ‘short throw’ projector produces a much larger image at close range, allowing the projector to sit between the viewers and the screen. And that’s what the ‘ST’ in the model number of BenQ’s new W1080ST+ projector means.
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What it is
The non-short-throw equivalent of this projector – the W1070+ – is already relatively short throw. For a 100 inch screen it must be located at between 2.5 and 2.9 metres. But the W1080ST+ needs to be between 1.522 and 1.826 metres from the screen, which is perfect for putting on a coffee table between you and the screen.
This is achieved by a rather bulbous lens. This features a relatively limited zoom range of 1.2:1 and has no lens shift. Any misalignment resulting in an angled projector can only be dealt with using a keystone adjustment, and this wastes resolution, so it’s a good idea to get the alignment right.
Producing the image is a DLP engine. BenQ doesn’t specify the Digital Micromirror Device it employs other than describing it as a Texas Instruments (as are they all) DarkChip3 unit. It delivers the full resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. A six times speed, six segment colour wheel provides the sequential colour. There’s nothing fancy in this, just straight RGB colour panels.
The usual kinds of inputs are provided: two HDMI sockets (one of them supports Mobile High-Definition Link), component and composite video and computer-style RGB. There are also analogue audio inputs. The projector has a little speaker built into the left hand side which can deliver the sound from those analogue inputs, or from digital audio fed by HDMI or MHL.
No 3D glasses are included with the projector, which keeps the price nicely down. However they will set you back – these are active ones, remember – by around $150 per pair. BenQ provided a set for me to check 3D performance.
Picture Quality
The short throw capabilities are not entirely cost free. In addition to forgoing a lens shift capability and paying an extra hundred dollars, it also introduced a very slight amount of geometric distortion at the furthest two corners of the picture. Typically that will be the top two corners (when the projector is desk mounted).
It was certainly noticeable when I was using the test pattern – which is a simple grid of white lines on a black background – to precisely align the picture with my screen. So I could see a slight bend in the horizontal line at the top of the screen. More precisely, it was flat across the central part, but drooped just a little at the corners. By ‘just a little’ I mean around 4mm at the edges of a picture 1820mm wide. With normal viewing with normal content, this was not at all noticeable.
On the review projector there was also a very slight misalignment in the colours in certain parts of the screen. Since there is only one panel, this must be a lens issue. The result was a subtle blue cast to greys right at the top of the screen and at the bottom right hand side. Again, not noticeable in normal viewing.
Out of the box the projector comes with its ’Sharpness’ control set to the maximum amount of 15. This is a very unusual sharpness control because, unlike that control on just about all other display devices, it didn’t produce a halo at the edges of objects, a kind of nasty distortion that is far too common. What it did was, well, just plain sharpen stuff.
Too much at 15 in my view. My test patterns had any anti-aliasing processed away, leaving visible jagged edges on high contrast near-vertical black and white boundaries. These were perceptible from the viewing position. It can be worth experimenting with a setting between 0 (no sharpening) and 7. Up around 6 and 7 the control added a slight pop to the picture without visible degradation from my (reasonably close) viewing position.
Again, out of the box, in Standard picture mode the grey scale was excellent, with no colour shift on any of the grey panels (they were all in the middle of the screen, away from the mentioned misalignment) and a close to perfect calibration at the dark and bright ends of the scale. I found it benefited by nudging ‘Contrast’ up from 50 to 53, and pulling ‘Brightness’ down by one notch to 49. The colour performance was strong as well, with accurate colour delivery, nicely rich, and with smooth graduations.
Black levels were okay. Certainly not class leading, but neither was it weak enough to be distracting from the action.
The progressive scan conversion with both 1080i50 and 576i50 content was first class. It was entirely automatic, and entirely accurate on even the most troublesome test clips I use. You won’t get any better from a ten thousand dollar projector. However it does not include any motion smoothing circuitry. This works by interpolating new frames between existing ones. Most of the time it doesn’t matter, but occasionally there are scenes where the cinematography is substandard, resulting in visible ‘judder’ as the image moves from frame to frame. There’s nothing to be done about that with this projector. Don’t get me wrong. This is quite rare. And can be considered a virtue. The extremely fast pixel on/off times for DLP projectors ensure that judder isn’t smeared out by adjacent frames merging. Consequently you get an extremely accurate depiction of the motion as delivered by the cinematographer, warts and all.
Another virtue permitted by the sharp switching of DLP projectors is superb 3D. I have come to the conclusion that in active 3D systems ghosting – the crosstalk in which the left eye seems some of the content meant only for the right eye, and vice versa – is primarily due timing. LCDs take time, measured in milliseconds, to switch from one pixel state to another. LCD projector makers often have to switch on one eye’s lens even though a residual image for the other eye remains on the screen. (Although they are getting better, and some use a form of crosstalk cancellation that largely eliminates this.) With DLP there is no lingering image so each eye gets only the image that it is supposed to.
The result with this projector was 3D that popped and was quite unmarred by any element of 3D ghosting.
The projector sends it’s sync signal optically – presumably in the infrared. This bounces off the projection screen and is detected by a small receptor on the left side of the glasses. If you cover this, after about five seconds the 3D sync is lost and the glasses let both left and right images through to both eyes. The glasses are powered by a low cost button cell.
There was not once a single appearance of the DLP ‘rainbow effect’ (brief unwanted flashes of tiny colour bars in the field of vision, especially when your gaze is sliding over the picture). The colour wheel emitted no audible noise. The projector was reasonably quiet on full power output, and very quiet indeed on ‘Eco’ mode.
Those who like playing action games on a large screen will enjoy this projector. It has a relatively low latency in displaying the screen image: a hair under 50 milliseconds. The lower the lag, the quicker you can respond to the bad guys on your screen. The projector supports the auto A/V sync features of HDMI as well, so if your home theatre receiver also supports it you don’t need to make the manual adjustment.
I gave the MHL functionality a whirl, with the expected result. On my 2013 LG Optimus G phone, it worked entirely as expected. On plugging it in the phone gave a few options (eg. video or photo display) and its image was mirrored to the screen at 720p. Video playback was jerky, which seems to be a weird frame rate issue with the phone (it also only supports up to 720p even though the videos are 1080p, and can be delivered at full resolution wirelessly using other devices.) As always, the Samsung tablet didn’t work, since to use MHL with Samsung devices – even if the display is a Samsung MHL-compatible TV – requires a specific Samsung adaptor, which kind of defeats the purpose.
In addition to accepting video and audio, MHL charges the connected device. The projector successfully topped up the LG phone’s battery to 100%. Just remember that there is no guarantee that any given so-called MHL compatible device with work with any given MHL display.
Conclusion
The BenQ W1080ST+ projector produces a very good image for a very low cost, and is especially suitable for 3D if you don’t mind purchasing the necessary eyewear for each viewer. And doubly especially if your room isn’t suited to a projector with a standard throw distance.
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