Most people know Canon as a maker of cameras, camcorders, and printers. But the company also produces plenty of other stuff, including video front projectors. After learning that Canon's Realis SX60 ($5,000), an LCoS-based model mainly intended for industrial applications — computer imaging, photography, and that sort of thing — also offers a Home Cinema mode to optimize its picture for movie-watching, we began to wonder: Can this projector cut it for home theater? Before we knew it, a box had arrived, and the Canon Realis SX60 LCoS front projector was officially plugged into the review queue.
All the front projectors we've tested in the past year are either 1080p- or 720p-rez models, but the SX60's three LCoS chips fall in between with a resolution of 1,400 x 1,050 pixels (SVGA+). It also differs in the native aspect ratio of those display chips — 4:3 as opposed to 16:9. That alone needn't prevent you from using a 16:9 screen, since the Canon can also format widescreen HDTV or DVD images. But the 16:9 route involves some ergonomic and picture-quality compromises, the details of which we'll get to shortly.
The projector's polished appearance definitely indicates that it's intended for things other than boardroom duty. With a slate-gray case, silver trim, and rounded edges, it wouldn't look bad at all hanging from a living room ceiling.
Controls including zoom and focus, as well as buttons for navigating menus and switching inputs, are on the top. Side- panel connections include DVI (HDMI- compatible with an adapter), a VGA jack that doubles as a component-video input with the included adapter, and both standard-def composite- and S-video inputs.
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The Short Form |
| Price $5,000 / canon.com / 800-652-2666 |
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Snapshot
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| This Canon projector delivers rich, accurate color, but a comparatively soft HDTV picture sets it behind the competition. |
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Plus
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| •Vivid, natural color •Bright picture with good contrast •Excellent picture uniformity |
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Minus
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| •Reduced resolution in Wide display mode •No display modes to format 4:3 pictures for 16:9 screens |
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Key Features
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| •1,400 x 1,050-pixel LCoS projector •Native 4:3 aspect ratio display •Home Cinema, sRGB, Adobe RGB modes •Accepts 1080p signals via digital input •Inputs: DVI, VGA (component-video with adapter), composite/S-video; USB •10.5 x 4.5 x 13.5 in; 10.5 lb |
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Test Bench
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| Measurements in the Canon's Home Cinema/Quiet lamp modes revealed a pink and greenish bias to the picture. After calibration, grayscale tracking measured ±243 K from 30 to 90 IRE —very good performance. The SX60's calibrated brightness approached 20 ftL, also impressive, and fan noise in Quiet mode was low compared to other projectors. The Canon's 6-axis color adjustment let me zero out any color-decoder error on both its HDMI and component-video inputs. Red, green, and blue color points on the projector were also very accurate. High-def resolution test patterns revealed a softer than normal picture with the projector set up for Wide display — not surprising, given its native 4:3 aspect ratio. Picture uniformity was excellent, with no tinting visible on gray full-field test patterns. Full Lab Results |
SETUP I set up the SX60 about 13 feet away from an 87-inch wide, 16:9 aspect ratio Stewart FireHawk screen — a gray material designed to optimize picture contrast with DLP and LCoS projectors. The projector lacks any kind of vertical lens-shift function — a pretty common feature, even in low-cost projectors — so there isn't much built-in flexibility for aligning its image.
Since the SX60 has a native 4:3 aspect ratio display, configuring it for 16:9 use basically involves selecting the Wide mode in the Setup menu and zooming the image to fill up the screen. As promised, I'll detail the downsides to that approach. First, since widescreen pictures occupy a 16:9 subset of pixels on the projector's 4:3 chip, you can't take advantage of its full resolution level — 1080i/p high-def pictures will inevitably look soft compared to those shown on 1080p-rez models. Second, the lack of any aspect-ratio controls on the SX60 means that you can't switch seamlessly between widescreen and 4:3 pictures, which appear horizontally stretched when the projector is set up for Wide display (to view them properly, you need to select the Full screen option from the setup menu and zoom in the picture to enclose it within the screen border). And there was also a degree of "light spray" surrounding the screen — an effect generated by the unused pixels in the projector when set up for 16:9 display.
Having registered those initial bumps, I found the SX60 remarkably tweakable. Its DVI input accepted a 1080p high-def signal from a Blu-ray Disc player. Along with its Home Cinema preset, which delivered clean, punchy-looking pictures with reasonably accurate color, the projector also offers Standard, Movie, and Presentation modes, as well as two digital photographer-friendly presets: Adobe RGB and sRGB.
Another nonstandard thing that I had to work around during setup was a lack of global color and tint controls for the SX60's DVI input. Instead, it provides a 6-axis Color Adjust feature that lets you independently tweak hue and saturation for red, green, blue, cyan, yellow, and magenta. (There are also user-menu controls for adjusting red, green, and blue gain and offset levels.) Although I found working with 6-axis Color Adjust frustrating at first, I ultimately grew to appreciate the level of control it provided. After I finished my setup of the SX60, colors looked more accurate on video test patterns than with most other projectors I've tested.
PICTURE QUALITY Given the SX60's impressive performance during setup, I wasn't surprised to see it looking equally good on movies. Watching a scene from the Happy Gilmore HD DVD where Happy (Adam Sandler) impresses a pair of moving guys with his golf ball-thwacking skills, I noted a wide range of green tones in the leafy suburban setting. Grass, shrubs, trees, plants — they all looked perfectly natural and distinct. More vivid tones like those in the orange, red, and purple flowers arrayed in the background also looked natural and balanced, as did the skin tones of Happy and crew.
Moving on to X-Men: The Last Stand on Blu-ray, the Canon's picture displayed rock-solid contrast in a boardroom scene at the Department of Mutant Affairs where the President (Josef Sommer) confers with the beastly, blue-skinned department secretary (Kelsey Grammer). I saw plenty of shadow detail in the bigwigs' dark gray suits, and the lines in their striped shirts and ties looked solid. Although the Blu-ray picture was relatively crisp and clear, its sharpness was several steps below what I've seen from 1080p-rez front projectors, including some "budget" models in this price range. The picture also looked slightly blurry in scenes with camera motion, such as a pan across the face of a building. Still, picture clarity was good enough during static shots that I could make out details in the maps lining the walls of the boardroom in X-Men.
BOTTOM LINE For a model designed for uses other than home theater, the Canon Realis SX60 LCoS front projector does an impressive job of displaying DVDs and HDTV at home. Its greatest strength is its accurate color reproduction — in all the movies I watched, colors looked vivid and natural. Punchy picture brightness and low fan noise also contribute to the Canon's home theater-readiness. That said, its inability to switch easily between standard 4:3 and widescreen image formats makes it a hassle to use with a 16:9 screen. And with several 1080p-rez projectors now selling for around the SX60's $5,000 price, I'm not sure why you'd select it over those options — unless you're a photographer looking to make use of the sRGB or Adobe RGB color space settings. In that case, you'd get an excellent projector for slide shows, and one that also looks really good when watching video.
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