You hear a lot of buzz lately about how inexpensive digital TVs have become. Prices for big-screen rear-projection TVs (RPTVs) have leveled off to the point where even high-definition models cost about what analog RPTVs cost before TV started to go digital. And the flat-panel plasma models that you thought you had to be a gazillionaire to afford can now be picked up for under three grand at the local Costco. But the biggest bang for your video buck right now has to be LCD (liquid-crystal display) front projectors. For less than $2,000, you can get a projector that will beam crisp, bright, 8-foot (diagonal) images onto the wall of your home theater. With a picture that large, you might be tempted to charge your friends and neighbors admission (remember to serve popcorn), because you’ll effectively be in competition with the local multiplex.
To get a grip on this low-cost, big-screen phenomenon, we selected three LCD projectors ranging in price from $1,800 to $3,000. Besides their reasonable prices, what they have in common is 16:9 LCD panels that produce pictures in the same widescreen format used by anamorphic DVDs and HDTV. They’ve also been engineered from the ground up for good-looking video — something that distinguishes them from typical LCD projectors, most of which are designed to be hooked up to a computer for business presentations. But that’s not to say you can’t connect these guys to your PC or Mac: with computer inputs like VGA jacks and DVI (Digital Visual Interface) connections, they can easily serve as big-screen monitors for Web-surfing and other multimedia pursuits. Two of them even let you plug in a memory card from a digital camera and project “slide” shows of JPEG images. Now, is that cool, or what!
While you can beam pictures directly onto a wall in your home, front projectors definitely perform best paired with a dedicated projection screen. For this test, I used a 92-inch (diagonal), 16:9 GrayHawk from Stewart Filmscreen. This $1,300 screen was designed for use with LCD and DLP (Digital Light Processing) projectors, both of which produce images that can look washed-out and low-contrast when shown on a standard screen meant for cathode-ray-tube (CRT) projectors. Each projector was installed on a low table approximately 11 feet from the screen.
PDF: Features Checklist
Panasonic PT-AE200U
Panasonic’s LCD line made the crossover into home theater a few years back, and the PT-AE200U ($1,800) is among the newest additions to the company’s projector stable. The compact, silver-cased unit can be mounted either on a table or the ceiling (with the optional $365 mount). Either way, it’s unlikely that you’ll be bothered by the internal fan because it’s practically inaudible at the low setting, the one Panasonic recommends for watching movies in a dark room.
The PT-AE200U’s 1.2x zoom lens allowed me to set it up between 9 and 11 1/4 feet from my screen. The pixel count of its three LCD panels (red, green, and blue) is 858 x 484 — a good match for widescreen movies on DVD, but not high enough to display HDTV programs at full resolution. Even so, the Panasonic can accept HDTV programs in both the 720p (progressive-scan) and 1080i (interlaced) formats in addition to standard 480i and 480p signals.
Video inputs include wideband component- as well as composite- and S-video jacks. There’s also a VGA-style RGB connector that you can use to hook up either a computer or an HDTV tuner. Another input worth noting is a slot on the projector’s side that accepts SD (Secure Digital) flash-memory cards. When you plug one of these in, the projector’s SD menu lets you create slide shows of JPEG images taken on a digital camera, and you can also watch the MPEG-4 movies that some digital camcorders can record directly to a memory card.
The Panasonic’s remote control is small, but it has a fully backlit keypad, and the buttons are clearly labeled. A row of buttons located on the top half let you directly access any of the projector’s video inputs. Additional controls let you toggle through the three user picture presets and the seven factory presets, any or all of which you can also customize and have the projector remember your changes. Pressing the Aspect button toggles through the display modes. In addition to 16:9 and plain 4:3, these include Zoom, for letterboxed 4:3 programs, and Just, which leaves the center intact, stretching only the edges of 4:3 images to fill the screen. There’s also a button for freezing an image onscreen.
Setting up the Panasonic proved to be quick and painless. After connecting a progressive-scan DVD player, I manually tweaked the lens’s zoom and focus rings and then used the vertical keystone adjustment (easily accessible from the remote control) to finish the job. There was no option to adjust the horizontal or vertical position of video sources — not a serious limitation.
The Panasonic has a five-step color-temperature setting, but there are no additional white-balance adjustments for tweaking the color-temperature presets. After I chose the lowest setting, colors looked vivid: the green Astroturf in The Rookie seemed very realistic (for something fake, anyway), and there was a wide range in the actors’ skin tones. The image also had a punchy, bright quality, with deep, almost CRT-like blacks.
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Although DVDs played on a progressive-scan player generally looked great displayed by the PT-AE200U, I didn’t get very good results feeding it interlaced programs from a standard player or cable-TV box. When I used the Panasonic’s composite- and S-video inputs, the image looked soft, and the lack of 2:3 pulldown processing resulted in stairstep artifacts in some movie scenes with diagonal lines.
The soft-looking image also tended to accentuate the screen-door effect — a gridlike image texture that’s common to lower-resolution LCD front projectors like this Panasonic model. It was fairly noticeable here. At one point, the projection lamp shut down after a few hours of continuous use. It took only a few minutes for the PT-AE200U to cool off and light up again, but I imagine most folks would find such a forced intermission irritating.
For an inexpensive projector, Panasonic’s PT-AE200U delivers very good video quality with only a few minor compromises. Paired with the right screen, it will provide a bright image with deep, satisfying blacks. And if you’re a shutterbug, the slot for plugging in SD flash-memory cards directly from a digital camera is like icing on the cake.
Philips Garbo
Like its solitude-craving namesake, the Philips Garbo ($2,495) makes a big effort to fade into the background where it won’t be noticed — a positive trait for a video projector. Shoebox-sized, it has a slim footprint, and its off-white case will blend seamlessly into most ceilings if you use the optional $175 mount. Most important, the projector’s whisper-quiet cooling fan won’t distract you when watching silent movies like those Greta Garbo started out in.
With our screen, the setup range afforded by the Garbo’s 1.2x zoom lens was 11 7/8 to 14 5/8 feet. Like the Panasonic projector, its 858 x 484 resolution is a perfect match for DVD but not enough for HDTV. The Garbo can accept video signals in all four common formats — standard 480i and 480p as well as high-definition 720p and 1080i — but all are displayed at 480p. However, when I used an A/V receiver to switch between video signals in different formats and send them to the projector’s component-video input, it often had trouble “locking” onto the new signal. To get any image at all, I had to toggle through the various inputs until I was back where I started.
In addition to its component-, composite, and S-video jacks, the Garbo has a VGA-style RGB input for connecting a computer or HDTV tuner. Other jacks include USB and PS/2 mouse-output ports. When the projector is used as a computer monitor, connecting your PC to either of these jacks lets you use the projector’s remote control as the PC’s mouse.
The remote is a throwback to LCD’s pre-home theater days. Tiny, with minuscule buttons, none of which are backlit or clearly labeled, it will have you reaching for a flashlight every time you want to control the projector. Pressing the Source button toggles through the inputs. To switch display modes, however, you have to dig through the Picture menu — a process that requires a bunch of button pushes. In addition to standard 4:3 and 16:9, the Garbo’s display modes include Movie Expand 16:9. This will blow up the letterboxed programs they sometimes show on the Turner Classic Movies channel to fill a 16:9 screen without distorting them. A similar mode lets you adjust the picture vertically to accommodate programs with subtitles.
As with other fixed-pixel projectors, setting up the Garbo was a piece of cake. After manually adjusting the zoom and focus rings on the lens, I used the keystone correction in the settings menu to tweak image geometry. The projector’s horizontal/ vertical shift adjustment also let me align my progressive-scan DVD player’s picture, which tends to shift to the left a few pixels. Any picture adjustments you make to the Garbo during setup are stored in memory. It seemed like you could save custom settings for each of the projector’s inputs, but for some strange reason the sharpness control tended to “stick,” retaining its previous setting whenever I switched between sources.
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After choosing Natural color tracking from the picture menu (the other option, Vivid, is for computer images), I selected the Warm color-temperature option and made some adjustments to the red, green, and blue color controls (see “in the lab,” facing page, for details). A scene of sandlot baseball in The Rookie was very crisp, with rich colors and very little artificial-looking enhancement on the edges of a bat or the batting cage. Skin tones were natural for the most part, though I did detect an orange-red tinge to faces in some scenes.
The picture looked considerably softer when I switched over to the projector’s standard (480i) inputs. It also lacked 2:3 pulldown for film-based programs on DVD or cable TV, which caused diagonal lines to break up into “stairstep” patterns in certain shots. For both of these reasons, I’d recommend pairing the Garbo with a progressive-scan DVD player and investing in an outboard line doubler to handle standard (interlaced) video sources like cable and satellite TV.
Many LCD projectors I’ve tested in the past had a tough time reproducing deep black. But when I watched the Coen Brothers’ black-and-white The Man Who Wasn’t There, I was pleasantly surprised by the Garbo’s black-level performance. Part of this was attributable to the Stewart GrayHawk screen, but the Philips projector delivered reasonably good blacks and a decent amount of shadow detail in a scene where Billy Bob Thornton’s character chats with the anguished man he’s secretly blackmailing. On a less positive note, a bright sequence inside a barbershop revealed a picture-uniformity problem, which showed up as a pink tint on the right side of the screen. When I went back to watching color programs, however, the problem wasn’t nearly as apparent.
As expected, TV programs like a cycling show on ESPN looked soft when I used the composite- and S-video connections and a little clearer when they were upconverted to a high-def format by my cable receiver. But the cycling program and almost everything else I watched on the Garbo looked dim. From my seating position 14 feet away I also noticed the screen-door effect.
Philips’s small, silent, and reasonably priced Garbo is a good way to get big images without depleting your living space or savings account. While not the best in its class, its video performance was reasonably good. Just remember to use a progressive-scan DVD player.
Sony Cineza VPL-HS10
With its distinctive arch-shaped case and funny-sounding name, Sony’s Cineza VPL-HS10 is hard to overlook. But perhaps the most noteworthy feature of this projector is that it offers HDTV picture quality for $3,000. The VPL-HS10 is equipped with a removable Cinema filter that attaches to the lens to boost image contrast. Both table and ceiling mounting are possible, but I’d recommend buying Sony’s optional PSS-610 ceiling bracket ($300) since the VPL-HS10’s fan noise is a few decibels louder than the other projectors in this test even when set to its low-lamp mode.
In addition to its three WXGA LCD panels, which have a native resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels, the VPL-HS10’s lens features 1.3x zoom. During setup, it allowed me enough range to position the projector between 11 3/8 and 14 1/4 feet from the screen. The VPL-HS10 can handle virtually any type of signal that you feed into it, from standard 480i to high-definition 720p and 1080i, even 1080p — the production format George Lucas used to shoot Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones.
The VPL-HS10 provides a full suite of inputs, including wideband component-video and a DVI (Digital Visual Interface) jack with HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) for hooking up a new high-definition satellite receiver with a copy-protected DVI output. The DVI input can also be used with a computer. Another hookup option is a proprietary interface that Sony calls PJ Multi. The supplied cable that connects to this input has component-, composite-, and S-video plugs on one end, and you can also order an optional cable with a VGA connector. Finally, a slot on the projector’s front panel accepts Memory Stick cards for watching slide shows of digital images.
Sony’s well-designed remote control has a fully backlit keypad and a clean, simple button layout — I guess someone at the company figured out it would be used in the dark! You toggle through the projector’s inputs by repeatedly pressing the Input button at the top of the remote. A group of six dedicated buttons directly below that lets you quickly access the picture presets, including three custom user settings. You toggle between display modes with the Wide Mode button. In addition to 4:3 and 16:9, the options include Zoom (for letterboxed 4:3 programs) and Wide Zoom (horizontally stretches 4:3 pictures to fill a 16:9 screen).
The VPL-HS10 offers more setup options than your average projector. By adding horizontal keystone correction to the standard vertical adjustment, its Side Shot function lets you place the projector at the side of a room rather than centering it on a table or the ceiling directly in line with the screen. In addition to the three user picture presets, you can modify its three factory presets, and the projector will store your changes. The only thing I found lacking was a horizontal size and shift adjustment, which was available only for signals originating from a computer.
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Watching The Rookie afterward, I was blown away by how good the picture looked. In a child’s birthday party scene that takes place outdoors, colorful party favors like balloons, hats, and streamers were incredibly bright and crisp. And the actors’ skin tones looked very natural: Dennis Quaid’s face had the right ruddy hue, while his mom’s and kids’ faces were distinctly lighter.
In the black-and-white The Man Who Wasn’t There, picture contrast was excellent in an Italian wedding scene that takes place on a farm. Plenty of detail was visible in the black dresses worn by a group of old widows, and highlights like sunshine bouncing off the surfaces of objects were subtle instead of looking burned out. I did notice a slight picture uniformity problem, but it was barely visible with black-and-white material and pretty much nonexistent on color images.
High-definition programs looked stunningly good on the VPL-HS10. Tuning in a documentary on organic farming on the local PBS HDTV channel, I could make out grains of dirt on a freshly picked bunch of carrots. And the rich green leaves of an arugula plant were so crisp looking that I was ready to take a bite.
Even standard-definition interlaced programs coming into the projector’s composite-video input were detailed and clean — along with 2:3 pulldown processing, this projector has a first-rate video scalar. The screen-door effect — a conspicuous artifact on lower-resolution LCD projectors — wasn’t much of an issue on the VPL-HS10, though I did detect its presence every once in a while.
Sony’s Cineza VPL-HS10 is among the best LCD projectors I’ve ever used. I can’t believe it costs only $3,000! HDTV-level resolution, flexible input and setup options, a Memory Stick slot for viewing digital photos, great picture quality from virtually any source — this is one front projector that has it all.
LCD technology is everywhere, from the flip-up screen on your cellphone to the touchscreen monitor that greets you when you visit a new ATM. As this test has proved, there’s no reason a multimedia-friendly LCD projector can’t be an option for a big-screen video display in your home theater. So black out those windows, turn off the lights, and make room on the wall for a screen. Low-priced projectors are the wave of the future.
PDF: In the LabPDF: Features Checklist