Verdict: Forget 24in gaming, get 24ft gaming.
The IT world thrives on competition, with rival companies driving each other to deliver better products at better prices. The Labs section covered big widescreen TFTs last month, so this month we're giving Labs some competition by including two widescreen projectors in the Reviews section. The 24ft maximum diagonal viewing area of this projector puts the 24in TFTs of the Labs last month to shame (Reviews FTW!), but can you really use it for gaming?
The obvious obstacle to using a projector is having a large flat white surface on which to project the image, and then reorientating your desk so that you're facing it. The W500 can focus between a range of 1.52m and 9m, providing a diagonal viewable screen size of between 3ft and 24ft (BenQ provides a Projection Calculator on its website).
As with all projectors, the BenQ W500 has a variety of tools to let you mount it with a high degree of flexibility. Keystone correction is the main option; this allows you to distort the picture geometrically so that it appears rectangular, even if you're projecting from a wildly non-perpendicular angle. Clever (and very expensive) projectors do this for you, but the W500 needs to be told. There are also screw-out feet to adjust the height of the projector, with a joystick-like fine tuner handy for positioning the picture in just the right place without moving the projector (the bulb becomes very hot in a projector, so it's dangerous to move when it's on). The zoom ring and focus ring finish off the basic job of setting up.
It's worth noting that the W500 is an LCD projector, while the Acer is a DLP (Digital Light Processing) projector. DLP technology is usually more vibrant, although it suffers from a side-effect called 'rainbowing'. An LCD projector avoids rainbowing by beaming its light (1,100 lumens' worth in this case, which is quite bright if you consider that a 100W lightbulb emits 1,200 lumens). However, as only a relatively small number of pixels (1,280 x 768) are blown up to a large size, LCD projectors suffer from large dot-pitch problems (where you can see the lines between each pixel).
Also bear in mind that the bulb in any projector has a limited lifespan -2,000 hours in this case, or 3,000 in dull Eco mode. A replacement bulb will cost around £160 inc VAT, which works out at a reasonable 8p an hour. The bulb runs so hot that the projector needs active cooling, and the fan inside the W500 isn't the quietest unit around, as the quoted 32dBA indicates (28dBA in Eco mode).
We first ran DisplayMate over the HDMI connection, although component is also available, along with lesser inputs such as D-SUB and composite. Despite the massive quoted contrast ratio of 5,000:1, you shouldn't expect a projector to be as good as a high-quality TFT monitor for visible range. We saw a slightly narrow range in the DisplayMate test, with detail lost towards the dark and bright ends of the test screen. Adjusting the colour controls didn't alter matters much, although we added an extra four points of brightness to clean up the whites. We also found that using the Warm colour temperature provided a cleaner, less tinted picture. Using a +7.5 IRE Black Level and the Dynamic IRIS (which adjusts the aperture of the lens to give darker scenes less light or brighter scenes more light, therefore artificially providing a greater contrast range and more detail) were both beneficial to the clarity of image. This is the best way to set up the W500.
The first real-world test was the HD-DVD version of 'Troy', which uses a natural colour palette and has lots of fast-paced action. Initially, we were a little underwhelmed by the image quality, as the colours lacked impact. We delved into more esoteric colour settings, upping Luma Transmission by one point for a little extra clarity. However, boosting Colour Saturation to 75 proved to be the most effective tweak, and gave ancient Greece a gorgeous realistic quality. We noticed little in the way of lost detail in shadows and brightly lit scenes, so the Dynamic IRIS was working well. For home cinema use, the BenQ W500 proved to be excellent.
However, this is Custom PC and not Custom Home Cinema, so the main question is whether you can game on the W500. We tried several games with variable results. World in Conflict relies heavily on small-text option menus and notification windows, and unfortunately, the text was blurred and too small to read comfortably. Still, the main viewing window looked awesome at that size. Less text-heavy games, or at least those with large text, played better. FPS games such as F.E.A.R. were frighteningly real, with life-sized targets screaming towards you. However, the large dot-pitch means that jagged edges are evident, so while the relatively small 1,280 x 768 resolution sounds GPU-friendly, you need to dish out a good amount of AA.
Conclusion
Possibly the main factor when considering gaming on a projector is whether you have a suitable surface to use, which you can also arrange your desk to face. The W500 is easy to set up if you do, thanks to its good keystone correction and adjustable image control. Once you've tweaked the colours, you'll see a high-quality image that brings films and games to life.
Be aware, however, that there can be some issues with text-heavy games being blurred and difficult to read.
