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BenQ PB6100


Date
: 01/21/05 – 06:35:59 PM

Author
:

Category
: Monitors

Page 1 : Introduction

With the increasing popularity of projectors in both the presentation and home theatre markets, we're finally beginning to see the cost of the projectors coming down enough to be a viable purchase for the average hardware enthusiast. Projectors can now be found for less than $1000 USD ($1300 CDN). In this review I'll look at the least expensive projector in the BenQ lineup, the PB6100. I'll be evaluating this unit regarding its performance in gaming and home theatre applications while connected to a computer. I will not be focusing on stand-alone DVD playback, HDTV performance or day-to-day office use. Along the way I'll also note some of the pitfalls, differences, technologies, and challenges specific to setting up a projector as compared to using a standard monitor. Let's find out how this model performs during real life use, for movie viewing and larger than life-sized gaming.

Page 2 : Packaging

The unit is packed between two thick, formed foam holders in a non-descript cardboard box and it comes with an additional spartan box containing a power cable, VGA cable, S-Video cable, composite video cable, a two-prong w/external ground adapter, a manual w/CD, remote control and includes a YPbPr to VGA adaptor.

Page 3 : Physical Description

The rear of the projector houses the input panel. There are no output or pass-through connectors; as a result, you would need to use this with a dual output video card if you wanted to use a standard monitor as well as this projector connected to a single computer. You get S-video, composite video, and a VGA input. Also, the rear of the unit has an infrared panel; two fans and the AC power connector and switch. The unit exhausts from the rear via two fans; this could create placement problems for some people. Ideally you would want at least 12" (30cm) behind a projector like this for maximum airflow. If you were planning on placing the unit on a bookshelf or close to a rear wall, you would be restricting the airflow through the unit. A projector set up like this, running hotter, is likely to shorten bulb life. With bulbs (frequently referred to as lamps in projector talk) costing upwards of $500 to replace, shortening their life is something to be avoided. I'll expand on the fans later in the review.

The top of the unit presents us with a number of buttons that are closely mimicked on the remote control. Four buttons along the bottom are Power, Source, Auto, and Blank. Above that is the four-way toggle, similar to a game pad- with up being Exit, down being Menu, and Right and Left being right and left! Above the toggle are the three LED indicators for Power, Temp, and Lamp. Further up the top of the unit is the Focus and Zoom rings.

The unit is front-vented, with the veneers angled down. Obviously the front also houses the lens of the projector. There is another infrared panel on the front of the unit. As well, there is a small Push button that releases the front foot for angle adjustment. There are two small adjustable feet on the bottom-rear of the unit to fine-tune the height-angle placement. There is also the standard key lock hole for those that may want to lock the unit up using a standard Kensington type safety device.

The remote control is a very slim unit. It uses a watch type battery; thankfully the battery is supplied. Along the top you have the same Power, Source, Auto, and Blank buttons as you find on the projector itself. You also have four buttons that mimic the four-way toggle found on the unit. The unique buttons are Freeze, Preset, PIP Source, PIP position and the two more to correct for Keystone. For those that may not know, keystoning is the widening of the top or bottom of an image due to projection angle. I'll discuss the use of these buttons further along in the review.

Overall the projectors appearance is a pleasantly bland black and silver; it is non-descript enough to fit into most living room/rec room schemes. It feels solid and quite well made.

Page 4 : Specifications

Here's the obligatory rundown of the specs lifted straight from the BenQ website:

The BP6100 is a DLP projector. There are two distinct technologies in the projector world, one is DLP, produced by Texas Instruments, and the other is LCD and is manufactured by a number of different companies. In an overly simplified explanation, DLP projectors shine grayscale light through a wheel that contains panels of red, green and blue, and then by combining how the light interacts with the wheel you get virtually all possible colour combinations. There are different implementations of this basic technology; some projectors have multiple colour segments, others spin faster, while others combine both. For a more detailed explanation of DLP technology, go to technology section of dlp.com. LCD projectors on the other hand pass light through three separate LCD prisms for each colour and then combine them to project the image. Each method has its own pluses and minuses. As it would go beyond the scope of this review, I'd encourage you to read about the differences at http:/www.projectorcentral.com/lcd_dlp_update.htm if you're interested. It's worth noting that one of the side effects of DLP is a phenomenon referred to as "the rainbow effect". Although this is supposed to be less of an issue now with faster colour wheels and more segments, even on this projector, which has four segments and a 3x wheel speed, it is detectable when looking for it. Unfortunately it can become glaringly distracting. I will discuss this issue further, later in the review.

Brightness specifications should only be used as a rough guide for comparison between competing projectors. There are many factors that can affect how bright a projected image looks. The surface of the screen or wall, ambient light, and the size of the image will all greatly affect the apparent output of a projector. Here's a quick tutorial on light measurement: A footcandle (fc) is how bright a normal candle appears at one foot; it measures radiance. A lumen measures how bright that candle makes one square foot of surface at one foot; it's a measure of illuminance. Direct sunlight is roughly 10000 footcandles. Rather than accepting the standard lumen rating of the projector, I will measure brightness in footcandles, using a standard light meter; this way there is a common base for the actual brightness of the unit.

Finally, Contrast Ratio is essentially a measurement of how much detail can be seen on screen with respect to the gradations of light to dark. Largely, contrast dictates how "black" black is on screen. Again, although a higher number is preferable, many factors such as ambient light and screen colour will affect the perceived black levels. It is commonly believed that DLP projectors have significant advantages over LCD projector in the contrast department, lately though, the tables have begun to turn, and a few companies have been producing LCD projectors with very high contrast ratings. I will comment on a number of the other items in the specification list throughout the review.

Page 5 : Setup

The projector will be attached to one of two computers. One, I use as my living room theatre setup and the other is my primary gaming computer. The ATI All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro powers the gaming box, while an original ATI All-In-Wonder provides the video in the theatre box. I project onto a white painted bare wall. I hope to upgrade to an actual screen or fancy theatre screen paint at some point, however the quality I get as it is has suited me well enough for quite some time now. The room is reasonably open concept and quite bright, with the throw from projector to wall measuring 113" (287 cm); the projector stands 29" (74cm) off the floor. Probably the single biggest determining factor for choosing to go with a projector is size. Therefore, one of the main considerations that must be made in a projector purchase is how large an image you can project in the space you can provide. Given my maximum throw distance, the largest 4:3 diagonal image I can get with the PB6100 is just shy of 68" (172 cm) using the full zoom capability. While this helps to keep the image reasonably bright (98 fc), it is about 8" smaller diagonally than the wall space I could use for projection. While that might not sound like much, it amounts to about 20% less projected area. Ideally you would always use projectors in a completely darkened room. Since I don't have the option to completely shut out light, I'll test the projector both in mild daylight and at night.

Page 6 : First Impressions

After setting the projector into position and aligning it so it was square to the wall, I turned it on. Two things immediately struck me: first, the image is projected entirely above the level of the projector in my setup. Although the projector's lens is 29.5" above the ground, the projected image starts 46.5" above the ground and the centre of the projected image is approximately 69" high. That's good if you're using a coffee table as a base, but it's definitely too high for comfortable viewing here. Secondly, yellows looked ashen and dank. The other colours looked better, black did look black, and the brightness looked quite good. Clearly, adjustments needed to be made. And that's where my first gripe comes in. When using the VGA input, you cannot make colour adjustments. There was no way to change the yellow. As for the image height, I opted to place the projector closer to the floor and tilt it upwards. The keystone correction doesn't seem to change optically; it appears to use digital processing instead; therefore, it leaves dark areas where the image should have been naturally. It also has the unfortunate side effect of introducing digital artifacts. I opted to live with the natural keystone image. Ideally you'd have a table setup about 15" high so that no corrections are required. I'll refer to image quality and issues of digital scaling shortly.

Page 7 : Operation and the Remote Control

Depending on your needs and setup, quiet operation is high on the list of priorities. Both rear fans suck air through the unit and are always in operation; it's only fan speed that alters the noise level. The PB6100 is quite quiet in Presentation Mode, my recommended setting, but even more so in it's Economy Mode. Although you apparently gain lamp life running in this reduced brightness mode, I'd recommend against it; the colours become somewhat more indistinct. My experience leads me to believe that there are many, many factors that will affect the life of the lamp; I'm not sure that sacrificing image quality to lamp life is a fair enough trade over the life of the projector. I'm still not sure what the "Vivid" mode actually does. As an option, it seems to look mostly identical to Economy mode. The 1.2x zoom does not assist greatly in placement, but image quality suffers little between no zoom and maximum zoom settings. The remote control showed decent range and it was easy to use it from almost any vantage I'd ever choose. Frankly, given the choices I had in the menus, none of them really aided the image quality in the end. Often the adjustments created undesirable results; altering the horizontal alignment adjustment resulted in cutting off the right hand side of the picture. In the end, I felt it was best to quickly set a few of the options, such as brightness and gamma, to my preference and leave the menu alone after that.

Page 8 : General Image Quality

It's a funny thing: before I get to more empirical image comparisons, over the time I spent previewing material, I found the yellow issue less annoying; it seemed to appear somewhat less obvious at night as well. The projector can display images from 640×480 up to 1280×1024. Amazingly, the projector can deliver refresh rates of 120 Hz at the 800×600 and 1024×768 settings. At 1280×1024 you are limited to 75 Hz. Unfortunately, all the video bandwidth goes to waste, as there is almost no visible variation between refresh rate settings. As well, any adjustment from the standard 800×600 resolution comes with the major hit of digital re-scaling. Basically it means that any adjustments made to the image are processed digitally, rather than optically, the result being analogous to using the digital zoom on a digital camera. Although it extends your range, it degrades the final image so much, that you'd be better of not using it in the first place. While working strictly with this projector's native format, 800×600, images appeared crisp and generally pleasing. However, any adjustments to geometry, or resolution, degraded the image very noticeably. This projector should be used at 800×600 and setup as square to the wall as possible for best results.

Using the Sekonic light meter, measurements were taken with a white image projected. At all four corners as well as the image centre, measurements showed quite even brightness across the entire display, variation was less than 5%, though it does appear a bit darker in the lower right corner of the image. While under very close inspection, pixilation is apparent, sitting back more that 1.5x the width of the screen, a minimum recommended placement, colours and images appear almost perfectly smooth.

Page 9 : DVD/Video Image Quality

After previewing a number of different DVDs and video files, including one of my favorite websites, Homestarrunner.com, I have to say that the overall quality of the image is quite good; reds look especially pleasing. Despite Homestarrunner's "The Cheat" not looking his usual colour, he looked sort of orange rather than his usual yellow, other flesh tones look very natural and colours appear mostly true to life. There are troubles though. As I mentioned earlier, the rainbow effect is apparent. This seemed to be more apparent playing back DVDs rather than video files, but it was always noticeable in some way. I'm not terribly sensitive to it, but I still found that during scenes that had both strong light and dark areas that there were subtle flashes of colour and other anomalies on screen. I can't say they were entirely distracting if I became absorbed in the material, more phantom-like to be sure, but if I was looking for them, they were apparent and could become quite distracting. I have had an LCD projector for a couple of years now, and I haven't ever experienced the same kind of visual/colour aberrations.

Here are a few obvious examples of colour aberration in the opening sequence of Natural Born Killers. I filmed the opening sequence of the movie and moved frame by frame to find the frames that contained anomalous material. From looking at the following captures, it is obvious that the colour artifacts are not imaginary.

Page 10 : Gaming Image quality

Well here lies the real matter. The only real reason to overclock, is to game, no? And we are here online to overclock, yes? For this test I hooked up my gaming rig and ran the projector through its paces. What can I say; playing huge…is huge. Having a larger than life-size Gordon Freeman hand as your entry into his world is definitely a plus, but again there were issues surrounding the rainbow effect. Especially a game like Half Life 2, with light and dark being a key feature of the visual style of the game, it unfortunately suffers due to the rainbow effect being painfully apparent.

While the colour shifts may not be quite as big as they are in certain movies, the dynamic, frantic nature of FPS gaming makes even small flashes all the more distracting. It is unfortunate too, because many of the areas are a lot of fun to play with such a large image. The brighter areas of any game, be it HL2 or Far Cry, really do look terrific so large, they play well, and there are not any artifacts or aberrations that would ever make you want to play smaller. However, navigating menus, working in areas of light and dark, and playing in all but the low-contrast areas proved to be distracting. I'm really torn, while this may not be a purchase-breaker for some, these flashes of colour proved too much for me. I had to stop playing my FPS games altogether.
With that out of the way, some games came across much better. In stark contrast to the FPS, I do enjoy my Tiger Woods PGA 2005 golf, and the Zen-like tranquility that can be achieved from the perfect drive. The PB6100 excelled at the huge green and blue canvas a golf course provides. Having a larger than life-size green to putt on seemed to allow me to focus more clearly and often putt better than I do using a 22" monitor. All in all, playing the golf game was hugely satisfying. Finally, I played a bit of NFS: Underground. It seems built to hide the colour anomalies associated with the rainbow effect, and as such, its visual style seemed to lessen its affects. Driving big is definitely a winner. Although I didn't have time to test out all games, I'm pretty sure something like Diablo 2 would play very well with this projector as well.

Page 11 : Conclusion

Once you get used to having a projector at your disposal, playing games and watching movies is never the same again. I think most hardware enthusiasts will take the plunge eventually. Big is good! So how does the PB6100 fare? Though it doesn't blow me away, I've mostly warmed to using this projector with the one, albeit large, caveat regarding the visual anomalies caused by the DLP rainbow effect. If you have a room where light can be strictly controlled, have at least 14' to throw the image, and can place the projector 12" – 18" off the floor with some ventilation room in the rear, the projector does a very good job for the money. If you can't really fulfill these requirements you either have to make trade-offs that frankly are not worth it, more appropriately, look elsewhere. There are projectors that are similarily priced these days; so you'd be best to check out your options. There is also for me, the nagging DLP projector rainbow effect issue. I cannot determine, given the small sampling of DLP projectors I have access to, if this is largely the DLP technology and not any fault specifically of the BenQ product, or there is something fundamentally flawed in BenQ's implementation of the technology, but the anomalous colour flickering is there. I'd definitely recommend that if at all possible, you preview a DLP projector to see how sensitive you are to its rainbow effect prior to purchase; that, or make sure a very lenient return policy is in effect from your retailer. In the end though, the unit looks fine, performs well in ideal circumstances, runs quite quietly, and is about as cheap as projectors go these days, considering all these attributes, it's really quite a compelling product. However, as with all things technology, there are undoubtedly cheaper units coming with even greater image quality. I'd love a projector that can do both 4:3 running at 1280×1024 or better and 16:9 widescreen natively, with a 1280×720 or better resolution, a high contrast ratio, whisper quiet operation, and while I'm wishing, I'd love to see much better lamp life. All of this exists right now, minus the lamp life issue, but will cost upwards of $3500 US, in six months though, who knows? Given most of us won't be spending that much presently, and assuming you want to get a projector today while spending as little money as possible, the BenQ PB6100 is certainly worth considering. Just make sure you look long and hard for those rainbows, once you see them, I can't imagine you'll ever be able to take your eyes off them again.

Advantages

Affordable
Huge display
Excellent for sports and racing games

Disadvantages

Rainbow effect
800*600 resolution
No colour adjustments with VGA connection