Projector Reviews

Full-On/Full-Off Contrast Ratio: 7,950:1

All the measurements here, unless noted otherwise, were taken from my 78-inch-wide, 16:9 Stewart Studiotek 130 screen (gain 1.3), with the projector in its Movie2 mode and IRIS1 in High Contrast, IRIS2 on (auto operation), and Eco+Quiet on (lamp setting low).

The full-on/full-off contrast ratio above is the best we’ve yet measured for a projector in this price class. It’s not state of the art, but it’s impressively close. But if you turn the auto iris off, the Sharp’s black level increases to 0.010 foot-lamberts with a peak white level of 15.15 ft-L, for a mediocre (by today’s standards) full-on/full-off contrast ratio of 1,515:1.

If you need a bright image on a big screen, the Sharp can provide it. With the auto iris on and the lamp on High (and Eco+Quiet off), it pumped 29 ft-L onto my relatively small screen. Add in Bright Boost, and the brightness increases to 32.6 ft-L—with a still highly respectable black level (auto iris on) of 0.003 ft-L, with a resulting full-on/full-off contrast ratio of about 11,000:1. (Note that high lamp mode operation will reduce the specified lamp life to 2,000 hours.)

In the Color Tracking charts below, I took the calibration results in the –1 setting of the Color Temperature control, at about 150 hours of use. The Before Calibration result is very good, and the After Calibration result is even better. In fact, it’s one of the best we’ve seen, with a Delta-E of under 2 at all but one point (3.2 at 50 IRE—see HT Labs Measures in the Epson review for more on Delta-E).

While the Sharp’s limited color controls were adequate to dial in this gray scale, keep in mind that as the lamp ages and its color slowly shifts (as it inevitably will), they may not be as flexible as a more complete set of controls would be in compensating for these changes.

The color gamut shown in the pie-shaped CIE chart above shows the Sharp’s skewed color gamut. As I noted in the review, the projector’s color management system didn’t always work. It also didn’t provide enough control to fully correct this color gamut even when it did have an effect. Therefore, the CIE chart does not include any contribution from the color management controls. But the Sharp’s stock color gamut didn’t appear to affect the projector’s subjective color in a way that’s likely to trouble most viewers.

The Sharp’s luma (black and white) and chroma (color) HDMI resolution in 1080i/p and 720p were excellent, and its HDMI SD resolution (480i/p) was good. Component resolution was a step down in all cases—good in luma but just fair in chroma.

Overscan measured zero in nearly all cases in both component and HDMI, with a few rare exceptions that never exceeded an insignificant 0.5 percent per side.—TJN