The Short Form

Price $5,000 / canon.com / 800-652-2666

Snapshot

This Canon projector delivers rich, accurate color, but a comparatively soft HDTV picture sets it behind the competition.

Plus

•Vivid, natural color •Bright picture with good contrast •Excellent picture uniformity

Minus

•Reduced resolution in Wide display mode •No display modes to format 4:3 pictures for 16:9 screens

Key Features

•1,400 x 1,050-pixel LCoS projector •Native 4:3 aspect ratio display •Home Cinema, sRGB, Adobe RGB modes •Accepts 1080p signals via digital input •Inputs: DVI, VGA (component-video with adapter), composite/S-video; USB •10.5 x 4.5 x 13.5 in; 10.5 lb

Test Bench

Measurements in the Canon's Home Cinema/Quiet lamp modes revealed a pink and greenish bias to the picture. After calibration, grayscale tracking measured ±243 K from 30 to 90 IRE -very good performance. The SX60's calibrated brightness approached 20 ftL, also impressive, and fan noise in Quiet mode was low compared to other projectors. The Canon's 6-axis color adjustment let me zero out any color-decoder error on both its HDMI and component-video inputs. Red, green, and blue color points on the projector were also very accurate. High-def resolution test patterns revealed a softer than normal picture with the projector set up for Wide display - not surprising, given its native 4:3 aspect ratio. Picture uniformity was excellent, with no tinting visible on gray full-field test patterns. Full Lab Results

Canon's tiny, somewhat limited remote control is similar to others we've seen bundled with projectors intended for business/industrial applications. It has a clean button layout, however, and the keypad can be backlit by pressing a button labeled with a light bulb in the lower right corner. You switch video sources by pressing the Input button and scrolling through a list of options in an onscreen menu (a set of direct-input buttons would've come in handy here). As far as display, or aspect ratio, modes go, the projector basically doesn't have any - hence the lack of a remote button to switch them.

SETUP I set up the SX60 about 13 feet away from an 87-inch wide, 16:9 aspect ratio Stewart FireHawk screen - a gray material designed to optimize picture contrast with DLP and LCoS projectors. The projector lacks any kind of vertical lens-shift function - a pretty common feature, even in low-cost projectors - so there isn't much built-in flexibility for aligning its image.

Since the SX60 has a native 4:3 aspect ratio display, configuring it for 16:9 use basically involves selecting the Wide mode in the Setup menu and zooming the image to fill up the screen. As promised, I'll detail the downsides to that approach. First, since widescreen pictures occupy a 16:9 subset of pixels on the projector's 4:3 chip, you can't take advantage of its full resolution level - 1080i/p high-def pictures will inevitably look soft compared to those shown on 1080p-rez models. Second, the lack of any aspect-ratio controls on the SX60 means that you can't switch seamlessly between widescreen and 4:3 pictures, which appear horizontally stretched when the projector is set up for Wide display (to view them properly, you need to select the Full screen option from the setup menu and zoom in the picture to enclose it within the screen border). And there was also a degree of "light spray" surrounding the screen - an effect generated by the unused pixels in the projector when set up for 16:9 display.

Having registered those initial bumps, I found the SX60 remarkably tweakable. Its DVI input accepted a 1080p high-def signal from a Blu-ray Disc player. Along with its Home Cinema preset, which delivered clean, punchy-looking pictures with reasonably accurate color, the projector also offers Standard, Movie, and Presentation modes, as well as two digital photographer-friendly presets: Adobe RGB and sRGB.

Another nonstandard thing that I had to work around during setup was a lack of global color and tint controls for the SX60's DVI input. Instead, it provides a 6-axis Color Adjust feature that lets you independently tweak hue and saturation for red, green, blue, cyan, yellow, and magenta. (There are also user-menu controls for adjusting red, green, and blue gain and offset levels.) Although I found working with 6-axis Color Adjust frustrating at first, I ultimately grew to appreciate the level of control it provided. After I finished my setup of the SX60, colors looked more accurate on video test patterns than with most other projectors I've tested.