Projector Reviews

Black: 0.0013
White: 13.85

Full-On/Full-Off Contrast Ratio: 10,654:1

Unless indicated otherwise, all the measurements here were taken in the User 1 picture setting mode with ConstantContrast engaged using the Economy lamp setting through an HDMI input, with the set adjusted for the most accurate picture in a darkened room. Note that the screen was a 92inch-wide Stewart Filmscreen StudioTek 130 G3, which is substantially larger than the 78-inch-wide StudioTek 130 Tom Norton uses for his projector measurements.

The LS-5’s terrific contrast ratio was measured very real world, with the projector set up conservatively to avoid clipping of head and toe room. The black pedestal was set correctly, and it showed the entire range above white with the Contrast set at just 62. When I turned ConstantContrast off, it dropped the contrast ratio to 2,500:1. This indicates that the dynamic iris system operates at a comfortable multiple of about 4x. When I turned the lamp up to Standard (with ConstantContrast on), it still delivered an impressive contrast ratio of 10,400:1, although the top-end light output increased by almost 50 percent. You can drive a very large screen with this projector if you choose to, but we recommend common sense here. You can save the Standard lamp output for goosing up the light output as the lamp ages.

As you can see, the gray-scale tracking was about as tightly aligned to the D65 standard across the brightness range as I’ve seen from any digital projector, and the out-of-box color gamut was nearly perfect. Green is slightly undersaturated, but everything from fleshtones to jungle foliage looked just right. Surprisingly, the luminance values for all six primary and secondary colors were spot on. The only exception was blue, which was not noticeable with program material. This would be an extraordinary result if I had used a six-point, threedimensional CMS to dial this in by hand. And when I watched movies, it looked every bit as outstanding as it measured.

After I looked at a variety of test material, I saw that there was nothing this projector didn’t do right. It didn’t have any pixel cropping, and its uniformity with very dark (black) and very bright (white) fields was excellent from corner to corner and in between. This is excellent measured performance by any standard.—SCB