BenQ W5000

I recently got in on the refurbished bandwagon for this projector. And I'm very happy with it. My old pj was the Mitsubishi HC3000 which was your average run of the mill 720p projector. The W5000 is a 1080p. I figured I'd share this journey!

When the box showed up at the door I was amazed at how big it was. Turns out that they packed the actual pj in it's original box within this box. :dizzy: Opening up the pj box I was again amazed at how large this pj was. It was over double the size of my HC3000. Needless to say, hooking it up required a run to the local Best Buy to pick up a new mount. After hooking it up and running it the first time (1 hour on the bulb from the service center by the way), I was yet again amazed at the image it was capable of. I had thought that I had seen enough with my HC3000 that nothing could be that much better.

Anyway, I was originally going to write up a review on this projector but I figured there are more than enough floating around in cyberspace that it was unnecessary to do another. Plus it's a year old release. so instead I figured I'd add to the calibration side of things with a quick rundown of how this projector was, with relation to standards, out of the box. I'll also show how I got it close in about 45 minutes. I would have kept working on it but I ran out of time.

The equipment used was my eye-one pro spectrophotmeter - not to be confused with the numerous eye-one colorimeters floating around out on the market, a Sekonic L758C light/spot meter, my laptop, and CalMAN 3.3.

Back when I delved into calibrating my own projector, I used HCFR. While HCFR is an excellent tool, especially for beginners or the once a year folks, I found myself looking for more. Especially when I was posting some of the charts here and I found out that some of the math in the program was wrong. I believe this was fixed for the current release of HCFR. I still use it occasionally but I mainly use CalMAN.

CalMAN is a bit more intuitive than HCFR in that it actually has various modes that it can be run in. It has beginner mode for the beginner, intermediate mode (what I use) for a little more advanced use, advanced mode for those who want full control, and a design mode which states it’s for “Workspace design mode; chart and report layouts”. It’s a wonderful piece of software and well worth the $100 or so I paid for it. If you’re looking for the simple program that will guide you through by the hand eventually teaching you enough so that you can do what you want on your own, this is it.

Maybe after doing everything in CalMAN I'll redo it in HCFR and see what kind of difference there really is. :scratch:

These first four sets of readings are the 'out of box' readings on certain factory pre-set modes. The spectro was ~2 feet from the pj lens, facing the pj.