My
first brush with home theater was in a large, dedicated room equipped with a
top-shelf cathode-ray-tube (CRT) front projector, a Faroudja video processor,
a 100-inch (diagonal) screen, and a killer sound system. Subsequently, I’ve
measured every home theater experience against that one, making me a tough customer
to please.
While I continue to be a fan of CRT projectors, I’m also aware of their limitations. They provide the ultimate in image quality — including deep, solid blacks and razor-sharp details — but they’re also bulky and expensive, and they need periodic maintenance. They also require an outboard processor to fill in the scan lines that become painfully visible when standard interlaced video is blown up to fill a really large screen. These shortcomings of CRT projectors have made me eager to see whether Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology, invented by Texas Instruments, can fulfill its promise to replace tubes in the projection-TV world. Judging from the wide assortment of DLP projectors now available, the new technology has made rapid progress. What’s more, a number of the latest models are HDTV-ready.
At the heart of a DLP projector is a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), a very high-tech integrated circuit with hundreds of thousands of tiny mirrors. The first DLP projectors used a DMD with a traditional squarish aspect ratio (4:3), but during the past year Texas Instruments has made a widescreen 16:9 DMD with a resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels — an exact match for the 720p HDTV format — available to manufacturers.
To give you a better idea of what you’re getting when you buy a DLP projector, and how it differs from a tube model, a brief explanation is in order. In a CRT projector, a tightly focused beam of electrons is fired at the phosphor-coated inner surface of the three tubes, one for each primary color (red, green, and blue). As the electrons strike the phosphor, they become energized and emit light to form images that get projected on the screen. A DLP projector generates images by beaming white light from a lamp at the tiny mirrors covering the surface of its DMD. Each mirror pivots up to 50,000 times a second between reflective and nonreflective states. The length of time a specific mirror reflects light determines where its corresponding pixel falls in the grayscale.
In single-chip DLP projectors — a category that includes most models on the market, including the three I compared for this test — color is added via a rotating wheel equipped with red, green, and blue filters. The wheel is placed between the lamp and the DMD, and its rotations are precisely timed to separate the light into red, green, and blue components. The filtered light is reflected in sequence off the DMD’s surface and beamed through a lens toward the screen at such a rapid pace that the eye is tricked into seeing a full-color image. In early DLP designs, slight time lags between the red, green, and blue beams created occasional artifacts, but current designs appear to have solved the problem.
Our three DLP projectors — the SIM2 Sèleco HT300 ($14,995), the Sharp XV-Z9000U ($10,995), and Runco’s VX-1000c ($16,995) — all feature the high-definition Texas Instruments chip. For my evaluations, I used an 80-inch-wide (92-inch diagonal) Stewart Filmscreen GrayHawk screen, a low-gain model designed to optimize contrast levels with DLP projectors. By the time the testing was finished, I had spent so many hours in the dark that I looked like Batboy from the cover of the Weekly World News, but that’s a story for another time.
SIM2
Sèleco HT300
SIM2 Sèleco, an Italian company that’s been building a reputation in the
U.S. over the past few years, manufactures DLP projectors with a wide variety
of pixel counts and prices. Of these, the HT300 is the crown jewel in the company’s
line. In addition to the high-def DLP chip, it features both a sealed light
engine (to prevent dust infiltration and light leakage) and Faroudja’s Directional
Correlational Deinterlacing (DCDi) circuitry to seamlessly line double interlaced
video material, with 2:3 pulldown for anything derived from film.
With its compact size, sleek industrial design, and gunmetal finish, the HT300 is one of the most striking projectors I’ve seen — it reminds me of an Italian sports car. Setup was fairly simple, and there are enough adjustments in the user menu to satisfy hands-on types who may opt to install the HT300 themselves. For best performance, the manual suggests you position it parallel to the screen and on its center line. This kind of setup will be hard to swing in most installations, however, so there’s a lens-shift ring to adjust image height and keystone correction to straighten the image out. The HT300’s zoom lens gave me enough range to position the projector anywhere from 12 to 16 1¼2 feet from the screen.
After you’ve positioned the projector and made height and keystone adjustments, you proceed to picture adjustments. Along with the standard set of picture settings (brightness, contrast, color, and so on), the projector includes presets to optimize its gamma curve for film, video, or computer images (gamma basically adjusts the brightness of images over different grayscale steps). It also features High, Medium, and Low color-temperature presets plus a User setting to create a custom grayscale (see “in the lab,” page 48).
The compact remote supplied with the HT300 fit comfortably in my hand and has a clean button layout. The remote provides direct access to controls you’ll use regularly, including input selection and aspect ratio control. My only complaint is that its keypad isn’t backlit. More than any other type of TV, a front projector requires a dark room for optimal viewing — that’s why backlit keypads are a good thing.
The HT300 provides every type of input you’ll need in a home theater setting. Both its RGB and component-video connections accept signals in the 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i formats. And for those in the projector’s native 720p format, its built-in scaler is completely bypassed
| SIM2 Sèleco HT300 |
| KEY FEATURES Faroudja DCDi processing Three custom aspect ratios Attractive design Small size INPUTS/OUTPUTS wideband component-video or RGB, composite- and S-video, VGA, and RS-232 inputs; two 12-volt DC outputs DIMENSIONS 13 3/4 inches wide, 63/4 inches high, 12 1/2 inches deep WEIGHT 123/4 pounds PRICE $14,995 MANUFACTURER SIM2 Sèleco USA, Dept. S&V, 10108 USA Today Way, Miramar, FL 33025; www.sim2selecousa.com; 954-442-2999 |
Five aspect ratio presets are available on the HT300: Normal, Anamorphic, Letterbox, Panoramic, and Pixel-to-Pixel. You can also create up to three custom aspect ratios and store them in memory. This feature came in handy because the Samsung SIR-T150 HDTV tuner I used for this test added narrow letterboxing bars at the top and bottom of the image. After selecting a custom ratio, I was able to eliminate the bars by using a vertical size adjustment to modify the image height.
Scaling can be a thorny issue with fixed-pixel displays like DLP and LCD projectors or plasma TVs. When it’s poorly implemented, images may look fuzzy, with smeared colors and soft edges. Overall, I was very impressed with the HT300’s built-in scaling abilities. In the DVD of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a film whose highly stylized cinematography makes it a challenge for video scalers, the projector cleanly displayed the misty-looking domestic scenes. For example, in a shot where the parents sit at the dinner table while their new android son looks on, the kitchen’s metal fixtures, wooden furniture, and lurid lamps all came across with solid color and crisp edges. And even though the image was grainy, the processing didn’t add anything in the way of artifacts to emphasize this texture.
Another feature that helped out when I viewed standard interlaced video was the projector’s DCDi circuitry, which contributes to its performance in a number of ways. First, it ensures that programs shot on video — like sports, news, or “reality TV” — are free of jagged edges and other motion artifacts. Second, it automatically detects film-based programs and applies the appropriate processing (on some TVs, you need to manually select this from the setup menu). Last, it enhances the projector’s sharpness control with a two-stage setting that allows you to make extremely fine adjustments.
High-definition images looked very crisp on the HT-300. As I watched footage from Japan on a D-VHS format high-def demo tape, both the stones in the Ryoanji temple garden and the gray sky looked as real as when I stood before them on a recent trip to that country. And the red of a Japanese woman’s traditional gown looked brilliant but without any flattening of detail, a problem I’d seen in earlier DLP projectors. My only complaint is that getting a sufficiently bright image on the HT300 with the 80-inch-wide screen required boosting its contrast setting a step higher than I really liked. Because the adjustment steps are relatively coarse, the compromise setting I opted for slightly overexposed highlights in images — a situation that could probably have been avoided by pairing the projector with a smaller screen.
I also found myself wanting an easier way to deal with the HT300’s input switching. In most home theater installations, an external video switcher juggles your standard and high-def sources, with one set of cables running to the projector. But with the HT300, each time you choose a source with a different scan rate — changing, say, from 480i to 1080i — you need to dig out the remote and manually change the input in an onscreen menu. Of course, switching would be simplified by using an advanced control system, like a Crestron or AMX, which is how most professional installations are likely to handle it.
SIM2 Sèleco’s HT300 is a projector that’s equally adept at displaying both standard and high-def images. Its light output wasn’t as powerful as the other projectors in this test, which means that you’ll need to think carefully about which screen you select. At $14,995, the HT300 may also seem pricey, but then again, it’s a compact, great-looking projector loaded with cutting-edge stuff, including video-processing technology that you could otherwise get only by spending thousands of dollars on an external scaler.
Sharp
XV-Z9000U
Sharp’s XV-Z9000U was the first DLP projector to feature the new Texas Instruments
high-definition chip, and the buzz that preceded its introduction was about
as loud as things get in the high-end home theater scene. So when a test sample
finally arrived at our video lab, it was already a celebrity, though its industrial-white
casing and loaflike shape make it look like the kind of projector you’d find
in any corporate boardroom. But you don’t have to be chairman of the board to
buy a Z9000U. At $10,995, it’s the most affordable HDTV-capable DLP projector
around.
Once I got the Z9000U up and running, I quickly saw what was special about it. First of all, I really liked its flexibility. Designed mainly for home theater use, it features several advanced video adjustments, including color-temperature and gamma controls. But it’s also easy to hook up to a computer for gaming purposes or whatever else. (The supplied software even lets you design your own gamma curves.) And its fine-sync menu lets you optimize the display for signals with a wide variety of pixel counts and scan rates, then store those settings in memory.
Setup was a breeze thanks to a well-designed and easy-to-navigate menu system. The Z9000U also comes with a fully backlit remote control, which has direct-access keys for each input as well as buttons that let you quickly adjust advanced settings like keystone, color temperature, and gamma. There’s also a button for selecting aspect ratio presets, which include Side Bar (for standard 4:3 aspect ratio images), Stretch (for anamorphic DVDs and HDTV), Smart Stretch, and Cinema Zoom. For computer signals, the choices are Normal (same as Side Bar) and Dot by Dot, which displays the output of your computer’s video card pixel for pixel without any scaling.
As with the Sèleco projector, the screen I used let me position the Sharp between 12 and 161¼2 feet away. The lens has both manual zoom and focus-control rings as well as a lens-shift dial and keystone correction. Most people will mount the projector on the ceiling, but it also has adjustable feet to aid tabletop positioning.
Inputs include two sets of jacks that accept either component video or RGB+H/V (red, green, and blue plus separate horizontal and vertical sync) and a VGA-style RGB input. Unlike the SIM2 Sèleco HT300, the Sharp Z9000U doesn’t make you adjust it when you switch between standard and high-def sources — it automatically locks onto signals at different scan rates, including 480i standard-def and 1080i or 720p HDTV.
In addition to the Z9000U’s standard settings, you can independently set gamma (the Gamma 2 setting looked best) and color temperature for each input, and then store your adjustments in memory. There are seven color-temperature presets, and you can modify these with the projector’s red and blue adjustments. Using them I was able to dial in a fairly accurate grayscale (see “in the lab”).
| Sharp XV-Z9000U |
| KEY FEATURES Custom gamma control Normal and Bright lamp modes Fully backlit remote control INPUTS/OUTPUTS two wideband component-video/RBG+H/V inputs; composite- and S-video, VGA, and RS-232 inputs; two 12-volt DC outputs DIMENSIONS 18 3/4 inches wide, 7 inches high, 16 inches deep WEIGHT 21 pounds PRICE $10,995 MANUFACTURER Sharp Electronics, Dept. S&V, Sharp Plaza, Mahwah, NJ 07430; www.sharpusa.com; 877-388-7427 |
You can adjust the Z9000U’s overall light output via its Theater Mode submenu, which features Normal and Bright settings. With Normal selected, light output is 70% of maximum, which has the benefit of decreasing fan noise. However, I found the Sharp’s image too dim in that mode, so I set it to Bright for most of my viewing.
The projector’s Progressive Mode submenu lets you optimize its scaler for either video- or film-based programs. I set it to Film, which engages 2:3 pulldown, and the DVDs I watched looked smooth and artifact-free. Unfortunately, the projector won’t switch automatically between its progressive modes on the same input, so unless you have your satellite tuner and DVD player connected to different inputs on the projector, you’ll have to revisit the Picture Setup menu when switching between the football game and movies.
Overall, the Z9000U’s built-in scaler performed very well. Images from the DVD of Shrek looked clean, and the projector’s accurate color rendition revealed subtle contrasts between Shrek’s toxic waste-toned flesh, the green velvet dress worn by the princess, and the blue-green trees in the background. There was also a satisfying level of punch to the image, with deep blacks and crisp highlights. In a few scenes, I noticed some softening on panned images and minor edge enhancement, but generally things looked very good.
Out of curiosity — and to level the playing field somewhat between the Sharp and the considerably more expensive Sèleco and Runco projectors — I installed a Faroudja NRS video processor between the DVD player and the Z9000U. With the Faroudja scaling signals to match the Sharp projector’s native 720p display, images were crisper than before, with even more vivid colors and virtually no edge enhancement. Adding the $3,995 Faroudja NRS increases the total ticket of this setup to about $16,000, so I’d recommend it only if you’re a videophile who relishes small improvements.
Moving on to HDTV, I popped the high-definition demonstration tape into my digital VCR and was transported to the American South. Loads of detail was visible in a shot of horses grazing in a meadow, and their chestnut-brown coats looked vibrant and clean. I was impressed by how well the projector conveyed the moody ambience of the late-afternoon light. A stop sign in a rural street had a completely realistic red hue.
It’s not cheap, but Sharp’s XV-Z9000U is a comparative bargain as HDTV-ready DLP projectors go. Besides flexible and computer-friendly setup options, it offers a bright, satisfying image and accurate color. While using an outboard processor improved image quality from DVDs, the projector’s built-in scaler also did a good job on its own. As I see it, the buzz surrounding Sharp’s foray into DLP is justified.
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Runco VX-1000c
The Runco VX-1000c isn’t just a DLP projector. It’s a video-projection system
comprising a DLP projector and the company’s PFP (pixel-for-pixel) processor/controller,
with a combined price tag of $16,995. You’re probably wondering if the two components
are available separately. The answer is no. Runco considers the controller,
which scales all signals to the 720p resolution of the projector’s DMD, an indispensable
part of the system. It says that the controller determines the quality of images
displayed from standard-definition video sources, like DVD and most satellite
TV, and it also handles video switching, picture adjustments, and aspect ratio
control.
The VX-1000c is available only through the company’s network of dealers and has to be installed by a Runco-certified technician for an additional fee. It comes with a set of RGB+H/V video cables as well as a Cat-5 data cable to link the projector to the PFP controller. The data connection, which Runco labels ComLink, allows the controller to handle all of the projector’s functions, from power on/off to color-temperature adjustments.
Pat Bradley, an ISF technician and consultant working out of Minnesota, handled the VX-1000c’s setup for us. Bradley positioned the projector approximately 16 feet from the screen, which is the projector’s maximum distance with an 80-inch-wide screen. Although you won’t have to worry about these details, the zoom and focus controls are located on the lens, and a vertical lens-shift adjustment is on the projector’s top surface. Keystone correction is available from the installation menu.
The VX-1000c’s palm-size remote control is deliberately stripped down to prevent confusion. There are basically only two types of commands, input selection and aspect ratio control. The latter lets you quickly switch between anamorphic widescreen (16:9), 4:3 letterbox, and standard 4:3 display. The keys do double duty for menu navigation.
When you consider that most front projectors are mounted on a ceiling, far away from your system’s A/V rack, Runco’s two-piece configuration for the VX-1000c makes a lot of sense. It’s more convenient to limit the number of wires running to the projector, as opposed to stringing up cables for each video source in your system. Connections on the PFP controller’s rear panel include a component-video input that’s compatible only with standard (480i) signals and is intended for hooking up a DVD player. There’s also a VGA-style jack meant for signals from an HDTV tuner or computer; these bypass the scaler and get sent directly to the projector.
You can make standard picture adjustments for each of the VX-1000c’s inputs from the controller’s main menu. Pressing buttons in a sequence detailed in the manual provides access to its installation mode, in which you (or your installer) can adjust the projector’s Luma and Chroma enhancement features as well as its color temperature. There are seven color-temperature presets, and you can further modify the settings using its red and blue level controls. You also set the projector to its Normal or Low lamp mode from the installation menu. The Low mode, which offers the benefit of extending lamp life, delivered a bright enough image in my setup.
| Runco VX-1000c |
| KEY FEATURES Includes external PFP controller for scaling, switching, and aspect ratio control Single remote control operation of both processor and projector INPUTS/OUTPUTS Projector RGB+H/V, VGA, and ComLink inputs Controller component-, composite-, and S-video inputs; VGA and RS-232 inputs; RGB+H/V and ComLink outputs; two DC 12-volt outputs DIMENSIONS (WxHxD) projector, 20 7/8 x 8 1/4 x 21 5/8 inches; controller, 17 1/2 x 3 1/2 x 16 inches WEIGHT projector, 50 pounds; controller, 16 pounds PRICE $16,995 MANUFACTURER Runco International, Dept. S&V, 2463 Tripaldi Way, Hayward, CA 94545; www.runco.com; 510-293-9154 |
From the moment I sat down to watch a movie projected by the VX-1000c, the bright, crisp image and brilliant color absorbed me. In the Flesh Fair sequence of A.I., which takes place outdoors at night, blacks looked solid, and plenty of detail was visible in the shadows. And when I shuttled back to a domestic scene, the actors’ flesh tones and the edges of objects looked natural, with no artificial enhancement. The projector’s 2:3 pulldown processing, a feature that automatically kicks in when you’re watching film-based material on video, kept diagonal lines solid, not jagged, in shots containing camera motion.
Viewing Shrek, I found the picture very sharp and detailed. In the dungeon scene where Prince Farquad tortures the Gingerbread Man, shadows looked solid, with excellent delineation between deep black and lighter gray tones. I was also impressed by how the projector rendered the prince’s red velvet cloak, which had a realistic sheen even though the image was dark.
Since the Runco did such a great job with DVDs, I felt confident that it would excel with HDTV. I was not disappointed. Watching the Southwest section of the JVC demo tape, which features shots of Utah’s famous Monument Valley, I could see every crevice in shots of sun-drenched cliffs as well as the fine gradations of yellow and green in the desert foliage. In these shots especially, the projector’s ability to display deep blacks and smooth yet detailed highlights made it seem like I was watching with a CRT projector.
When you compare Runco’s VX-1000c with the Sharp XV-Z9000U, its $16,995 price sticks out. But once you’ve settled in and watched its bright, clean, and cinematic image with DVDs and HDTV programs, the $6,000 difference may seem worth it. With the VX-1000c, Runco has a front-projection system that will make even die-hard CRT fans turn their heads.
After spending many hours with these three state-of-the-art DLP projectors, I’ve come to two conclusions. The first is that DLP has come a long way since the first Texas Instruments demonstrations of the technology that I caught back in 1998. The second is that I desperately want one — and the sooner the better! Life doesn’t get much better than watching a DVD movie blown up to near-theater size in the comfort of your own home.