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Best Buys Audio & AV 2017-#1 7 TVs/PROJECTORS A nd then there were two! Two brands of home theatre projector now available to Australia, that is, which are capable of delivering Ultra High Definition video. BenQ has released its first Ultra HD projector, the W11000. EQUIPMENT Being BenQ, the W11000 uses DLP technology from Texas Instruments, with one Digital Micromirror Device. We shall return to a very surprising aspect of the DMD used in the projector shortly. First, though, the other stuff. This is a physically large, imposing projector, weighing very nearly 15kg and measuring over half a metre long. The inputs are minimal — the only analogue inputs are via a D-SUB15 VGA-style socket. There are a couple of triggers, RS-232C, a USB Mini-B socket (for firmware updates), an IR input and an Ethernet socket, again for control. A 240W lamp pushes up to 2200 ANSI lumens of light out of the lens. There are three lamp modes: Normal, Eco and Smart Eco, the last adjusting automatically to what the projector thinks is appropriate for the given ambient light. The lens has a zoom range of 1.5:1 and both vertical and horizontal lens shift, adjusted by means of controls on the top of the projector. These offer up to 27% of screen width in horizontal shift, and up to 65% of screen height in vertical shift. For a 100-inch screen the projector needs to be mounted 3.0 to 4.5 metres away. We weren’t inclined to check if there is keystone adjustment, since you’d be mad to purchase a projector like this and then mount it at an angle to your screen. But we caved and checked. Apparently BenQ agrees with us: there’s no keystone adjustment available. One of the HDMI inputs accepts signals up to 1080p. The other one supports HDCP 2.2 — the necessary copy projection standard to handshake with Ultra HD Blu-ray. It accepts signals up to 3840 by 2160 pixels at 60 frames per second, progressive. It does not support any form of 4096 by 2160 pixel (commercial 4K) signals. The projector is THX HD certified and defaults to a THX picture mode. It can be ISF calibrated. It is factory calibrated to the REC.709 colour standard. It does not support HDR, nor wide colour. The lack of HDR support surprised us, but BenQ argues that currently projectors don’t have the contrast ratio range to allow this to be properly employed — particularly brightness limitations at the top end. Were an HDR signal spread proportionally across the brightness range provided by a front projector, the mid-tones would prove much too dark. BenQ notes that there are as yet no set standards available for projectors in the Ultra HD Premium certification granted to some OLED and LED/LCD TVs. Now, to the display of Ultra HD. We were at first confused. We assumed that a display with a 3840 by 2160 resolution and a total of 8.3 million pixels would involve the use of a digital micromirror device with a resolution of 3840 by 2160 pixels. Turns out we were wrong. In fact, the DMD employed has 2716 by 1528 pixels, for a total of 4.15 million pixels, which is slightly more than double the number of pixels in full-HD. Doubling again to 8.3 megapixels is doable, of course, but at the cost of a much larger chip and a very much larger price, as can be seen on Sony’s native 4K projectors. So the DMD takes us halfway there. Then the Texas Instruments technology called XPR comes in. Remember, Texas Instruments invented and appears to still be the sole maker of DMDs. XPR apparently stands for ‘eXpanded Pixel Resolution’. We say ‘apparently’ because there’s very little information available about how all this works. And to a certain extent, understanding isn’t really required if what we see on the screen clearly works. And we’ll get to that soon. But first let us lay out what we do know. The resolution is doubled by means of an ‘optical actuator’, which displays each physical pixel twice, each display shifted diagonally by a AV PROJECTOR BENQ W11000

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Page 1: AV PROJECTOR BENQ W11000 - bqpimage.azureedge.netbqpimage.azureedge.net/au-img/AU_BestBuysAudioAV_BenQ_W11000.pdfDefinition video. BenQ has released its first Ultra HD projector, the

Best Buys Audio & AV 2017-#1

7

TVs/PROJECTORS

And then there were two! Two brands of home theatre projector now available to Australia, that is, which are capable of delivering Ultra High

Definition video. BenQ has released its first Ultra HD projector, the W11000.

EQUIPMENTBeing BenQ, the W11000 uses DLP technology from Texas Instruments, with one Digital Micromirror Device. We shall return to a very surprising aspect of the DMD used in the projector shortly. First, though, the other stuff.

This is a physically large, imposing projector, weighing very nearly 15kg and measuring over half a metre long. The inputs are minimal — the only analogue inputs are via a D-SUB15 VGA-style socket. There are a couple of triggers, RS-232C, a USB Mini-B socket (for firmware updates), an IR input and an Ethernet socket, again for control.

A 240W lamp pushes up to 2200 ANSI lumens of light out of the lens. There are three lamp modes: Normal, Eco and Smart Eco, the last adjusting automatically to what the projector thinks is appropriate for the given ambient light.

The lens has a zoom range of 1.5:1 and both vertical and horizontal lens shift, adjusted by means of controls on the top of the projector. These offer up to 27% of screen width in

horizontal shift, and up to 65% of screen height in vertical shift. For a 100-inch screen the projector needs to be mounted 3.0 to 4.5 metres away.

We weren’t inclined to check if there is keystone adjustment, since you’d be mad to purchase a projector like this and then mount it at an angle to your screen. But we caved and checked. Apparently BenQ agrees with us: there’s no keystone adjustment available.

One of the HDMI inputs accepts signals up to 1080p. The other one supports HDCP 2.2 — the necessary copy projection standard to handshake with Ultra HD Blu-ray. It accepts signals up to 3840 by 2160 pixels at 60 frames per second, progressive. It does not support any form of 4096 by 2160 pixel (commercial 4K) signals.

The projector is THX HD certified and defaults to a THX picture mode. It can be ISF calibrated. It is factory calibrated to the REC.709 colour standard. It does not support HDR, nor wide colour. The lack of HDR support surprised us, but BenQ argues that currently projectors don’t have the contrast ratio range to allow this to be properly employed — particularly brightness limitations at the top end. Were an HDR signal spread proportionally across the brightness range provided by a front projector, the mid-tones would prove much too dark. BenQ notes that there are as yet no set standards available for projectors in the

Ultra HD Premium certification granted to some OLED and LED/LCD TVs.

Now, to the display of Ultra HD. We were at first confused. We assumed that a display with a 3840 by 2160 resolution and a total of 8.3 million pixels would involve the use of a digital micromirror device with a resolution of 3840 by 2160 pixels. Turns out we were wrong.

In fact, the DMD employed has 2716 by 1528 pixels, for a total of 4.15 million pixels, which is slightly more than double the number of pixels in full-HD. Doubling again to 8.3 megapixels is doable, of course, but at the cost of a much larger chip and a very much larger price, as can be seen on Sony’s native 4K projectors.

So the DMD takes us halfway there. Then the Texas Instruments technology called XPR comes in. Remember, Texas Instruments invented and appears to still be the sole maker of DMDs. XPR apparently stands for ‘eXpanded Pixel Resolution’. We say ‘apparently’ because there’s very little information available about how all this works. And to a certain extent, understanding isn’t really required if what we see on the screen clearly works. And we’ll get to that soon. But first let us lay out what we do know.

The resolution is doubled by means of an ‘optical actuator’, which displays each physical pixel twice, each display shifted diagonally by a

AV PROJECTOR

BENQ W11000BENQ W11000W11000

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Page 2: AV PROJECTOR BENQ W11000 - bqpimage.azureedge.netbqpimage.azureedge.net/au-img/AU_BestBuysAudioAV_BenQ_W11000.pdfDefinition video. BenQ has released its first Ultra HD projector, the

Single pixel lines on a UHD test pattern, delivered successfully by the BenQ, with some artefacts.

8 www.avhub.com.au

TVs/PROJECTORS

certain amount. This sounds remarkably like the ‘pixel shifting’ technology of some other projectors about which we’ve been either dismissive, or grudgingly accepting, depending on the imple-mentation and its effects.

Yet we must note that DLP switching speed is so fast that the shifted pixels are likely to be more cleanly separated from each other, and that because we’re starting with a much higher resolution in the first place, resolution can’t help but be higher than using shifted pixels for a 1920 by 1080 display.

While talking to BenQ, trying to gain greater understanding of how the system worked, we were told that the two separate frames that are thus created move so quickly the shift is imperceptible by people. But “technically, if you use a high speed camera to shoot the projection image you will get a 120 fps result”.

Since it was a Taiwanese engineer writing, and since Taiwan is a 60Hz nation, we mentally added at the end of that ‘or 100 fps result’ for 50Hz content. Turns out we were wrong again.

PerformanceSo let us quickly dispose of the normal things we talk about in these reviews. Yes, we’ve seen darker blacks in a projector picture, but the dynamic iris here nonetheless delivered an engaging level of black that was better than you’re going to see at a cinema, and quite low enough to not draw attention to itself.

The default picture mode was THX and, regardless of specification, it didn’t seem quite as bright as we are used to on our projection screen. We went to the lamp output setting to see if it could be brightened a little, but it was already set to ‘Normal’, which is the brightest setting.

We don’t want to exaggerate this. Seconds after settling down and watching a program, our eyes had adjusted and it never once occurred to us that we might have preferred the picture a touch brighter. However we think that one would rarely use the lower brightness Eco mode.

Could this be because the projector is only painting half the pixels in the UHD grid at a time?

Before getting to UHD discs, we felt we should check whether the projector was actually producing the advertised number of dots. We fed it our static UHD test pattern (you can download this via avhub.com.au/UHDtest) to the projector using a UHD Blu-ray player, reading the image from the network. Each horizontal line in the text pattern

was one pixel tall. Each vertical line was one pixel wide. As you can see from the photo above, they are all delivered. So case proven. This truly is an Ultra High Definition Projector, delivering the available detail down to the pixel level.

If we look a little closer, you wouldn’t say that it does so entirely cleanly. Certainly some of the horizontal lines seem cleanly separated from the ones above and the ones below, particularly the blue ones. But even those seem a little variable in thickness. The green and red lines seem to show a ‘beat’ pattern when there’s a mismatch between the signal and native resolution. Nonetheless, while this might reduce the contrast on fine detail somewhat, it is still there. Likewise for the vertical lines, except that there seem to be hints of diagonal movement of the pixels showing up here. (We used a really long exposure — a fifth of a second — on these shots, so you’re getting 24 cycles of the optical actuator in these pictures.)

Those were at the default setting with a Sharpness of ‘10’. Turning it down to zero made little difference to the horizontal lines, but tended to blur the vertical ones into each other.

Note also that all the red lines are red, blue are blue, and so on. With this test pattern, that indicates that a full 4:4:4 colour signal is being carried from source to display.

Enough of tests! We watched the UHD versions of ‘Pacific Rim’ and ‘Superman vs Batman: Dawn of Justice’ with this projector, as well as a fair bit of regular full-HD content. It did a fine job indeed on the latter. ‘Pacific Rim’ was good and sharp. And there were moments in SvB where the UHD really paid off. It’s really hard to put your finger right on them: things just seemed that much sharper, that little bit cleaner, that much slightly easier on the eye. Except when a particularly fine font lists stars near the start of the movie. This was wonderfully thin and beautifully drawn — it would be beyond the capabilities of a full-HD projector. Yet, looking closely, here also there was a fine, barely perceptible zigzag to the edges, seemingly thanks to the pixel switching.

Net result on UHD discs? Wonderful!Some sacrifices have been made for this result,

though. First, there’s no frame interpolation motion smoothing. The available time is being taken up moving pixels, so there’s no time left to display newly created intermediate frames.

Second: where we had been wrong again. This projector converts 50Hz content to 60Hz. So any pan on an Australian DVD is going to be jerky. If you’re watching credit scroll, they’re going to jerk unevenly. You make 60fps out of 50fps by repeating every fifth frame. Jerkiness is inevitable.

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Page 3: AV PROJECTOR BENQ W11000 - bqpimage.azureedge.netbqpimage.azureedge.net/au-img/AU_BestBuysAudioAV_BenQ_W11000.pdfDefinition video. BenQ has released its first Ultra HD projector, the

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Best Buys Audio & AV 2017-#1

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BenQ W11000 AV projector• Ultra HD for the big screen• THX HD approved picture quality• Excellent value for money

• Converts Australian 50Hz content to 60Hz• No HDR or wider colour gamut support• Some apparent artefacts on fi ne UHD detail

Price: $7999

Projection technology: 1 x Digital Micromirror Device (size not stated)Resolution: 3840 by 2160 pixels (with XPR); 2716 x 1528 (without XPR)Aspect ratio: 16:9Lamp: 240 wattsLamp life: 2500/3500/6000 hours (Normal/Economic Mode/SmartEco Mode)Contrast ratio: 50000:1Brightness: 2200 ANSI LumensInputs: 2 x HDMI (1 with UHD support), 1 x D-SUB15Other: 1 x RS-232C, 1 x USB-B, 2 x 12 volt trigger, Ethernet, 1 x IR InDimensions (whd): 471 x 225 x 565mmWeight: 14.8kgWarranty: Three years (incl. three years and unrestricted hours for lamp)

Contact: BenQ AustraliaTelephone: 1300 130 336 Web: www.benq.com.au

It’s also a good idea to avoid sending interlaced 50Hz material in interlaced format to the projector. It offers no control over deinterlacing. One of our test clips had the astonishing feature, when fed as 576i/50, of being incorrectly interpreted as video sourced, when it’s actually film sourced, and thereby generating swirly moire artefacts, while at exactly the same time displaying comb artefacts as though video-sourced material was being incorrectly interpreted as film sourced! That’s the weird stuff that happens when you turn 50fps to 60fps.

CONCLUSIONWe guess that last bit suggests that if you simply must watch a lot of Australian TV on your projector, the BenQ W11000 might not be suitable. But for normal Blu-rays and particularly for Ultra HD Blu-ray, to the extent that more resolution is available on the disc beyond that on the regular Blu-ray, the BenQ W11000 will deliver it.

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