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BenQ W500 projector

There’s more to image quality than a massive pixel-count

The image quality from the W500 is very good indeed. It produces a sharp picture with good colour depth and contrast, while skin tones look noticeably more life-like than those produced by competitors such as Samsung’s SP400B.

However, this level of quality was not achieved without some tweaking of settings. When viewed side-by-side with some competing models our opinion on which projector looked best changed many times as we made alterations via the configuration menu.

BenQ W500 projector

The W500 uses LCD technology rather than the ever-popular DLP system

Most important when viewing movies was to leave the dynamic iris function enabled. The improvement this achieved was more noticeable on the W500 than on many other projectors and without it, black levels looked really un-impressive. However, once enabled the picture quality was easily among the best we’ve seen. Other than that setting, we liked the picture best with all the remaining image enhancements left disabled. This W500’s use of LCD technology has one major advantage – and that’s the absence of the so-called rainbow effect often noticed with DLP projectors. Some people seem to notice this unpleasant coloured banding more than others, so if you are one of these unfortunate individuals, the W500 is going to be streets ahead of a DLP projector for you.

Yes it’s “only” a 720p projector, but there’s much more to image quality then sheer pixel resolution. We feel that, for the price, most users will be more than satisfied with the images the W500 can deliver.

Next page: Verdict

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