Planar PD8150 DLP Projector Setup & Tests

Setup & Tests
Thanks to the clear and thorough owner's manual, setup was relatively straightforward. But, as always, finding the best settings took some time. I'll only note a few specifics here—for a list of the settings I used, see the Measurements section.

The lamp's Economy setting was more than bright enough for my screen. I preferred to leave BrilliantColor off most of the time, but it did help with some program material. The CRT setting of the Gamma control (specified to be a gamma of 2.5) worked best for me on most sources, but it sometimes looked too dark, in which case I used the Film setting.

I set the Color Gamut to Auto for most of my viewing, but the visible differences in other settings of this control were very subtle. With the DLP Frame Rate control set to Auto, a 60fps source was displayed at 60Hz, while a 24fps source was reproduced at 48Hz.

Planar's customized Gennum video processing was first rate. It turned in excellent scores across the board (apart from a merely "good" score on one of the jaggies tests on the HQV Benchmark DVD). I can't name a display I've tested that has performed better on my regular battery of standard-definition deinterlacing and scaling tests. It performed equally well on 1080i tests, including proper deinterlacing and full recognition of 3:2 pulldown on film-based material.

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