The Viewsonic Precision Pro 8100 is a Full HD, LCD projector with a stylish design, but which bears some picture-quality problems. Released in January 2008, the device currently sells online for around 2,100 GBP.

• Excellent colors.
• Electronic, 2D lens-shift.
• Superb de-interlacing.
• Very quiet.

• Average contrast.
• "Auto Iris" exacerbates picture errors.
• Conversion to 60 hertz gives juddering PAL-format pictures.
• 24p playback also judders.

It's the one we've all been waiting for: An elegant, quiet, HDTV projector with flexible positioning. The factory setup is correct, offering well balanced colors, but - at least for discerning movie fans - the Viewsonic Precision Pro 8100 falls short of the mark with occasional errors and artifacts.

Connections:

2x 1x

Introduction

If you like a good looking piece of kit, look no further. You can swap the series-standard, black finish for a white, grey, or even red casing, making this device perfect for a ‘lifestyle' home-theater. But it's not all about looks.

Tech-heads won't be disappointed: This projector provides HQV video processing, courtesy of Silicon Optix, and achieves a huge 13,000:1 contrast-ratio, thanks to the latest picture technologies and an automated iris.

Features and Operation

The Pro 8100 provides plenty of digital and analog connectivity, including two HDMIs and two YUV interfaces.

It's often tricky to position and align a projector correctly, but the Viewsonic makes this process a breeze, with the help of powerful optics, fully motorized focus adjustment, 1.6x zoom, and an electronic lens-shift.

You can adjust the picture's size over a wide range of values, so the projector can happily stand on the floor, in a two-meter-high bookcase, for example, or even to the side of the screen.

With only a quiet buzz, the motors can shift the image up to 1.70 meters upwards or downwards, while the lateral lens-shift allows for a screen centered up to 25 centimeters left or right of the line of projection.

There is, however, one irritating point: During the motorized adjustment, the Pro 8100 insists on covering the entire picture with its white start-up screen and the Viewsonic logo.

The remote control's buttons light up, allowing mid-movie adjustments without you having to turn on the lights.

Contrast and "Auto Iris" Mode:
An automatically controlled iris increases the LCD contrast. The user cannot adjust this manually, but can at least deactivate the option if it fails to meet with approval. In the "Auto Iris" mode, numerous other video-processing circuits come into effect, but simply don't improve the picture.

Video Settings:

It's rare to find deep-reaching settings such as this 32-band gamma control.

Experienced users will love the deep-reaching video settings - for example, the 32-band gamma control, or the complete color-management for primary and secondary colors. These, however, are only accessible in the "User" mode, which starts off with uncorrected colors and grayscales.

The factory presets, on the other hand, deserve some praise. In the "Cinema" and "Warm 1" modes, the Pro 8100 provides accurately balanced colors, right from the word go. Blue primary and secondary colors look excellent, and reds tend only slightly towards orange. If a green tint appears during DVD playback via HDMI, this can be to do with the YUV color space.

In our test, we fed the projector a PAL test-signal, upscaled to 1080p by our Denon 2930 player. Simply switching the projector over from "YCbCr" to "YPbPr" provided totally balanced colors. But, especially with test patterns of varying brightness, you notice the effects of various iris, video-contrast, and gamma-response processes, which in some cases take a few seconds to complete.

This means that whenever a bright scene quickly follows a dark one, it will look dazzling - with over-exaggerated contrast and lamp-related color errors - until the projector finds its way back to an accurately corrected grayscale-representation.

This is a classic case of "Too many cooks spoil the broth": In this example, there are too many "image enhancements" attempting to improve the "contrast". You hardly benefit from the (up to) 4,000:1 contrast-ratio that the automatic iris can produce, because the so-called enhancements sharpen static patterns during motion, producing red or green fringing. Turning off the "Auto Iris" results in a more authentic picture, but limits the maximum contrast to just 600:1 - way below the specified value.

Lamp "Eco" Mode:
The lamp's "Eco" mode provides sufficient brightness for projection screens up to two-meters wide, while reducing the noise of the fans to a more-pleasant 25 dBA.

Picture Quality

TV and DVD:
The Viewsonic developers seem to have overlooked the European, 50-hertz frame rate for TV channels and PAL DVDs: All analog inputs convert 50-Hz signals into slightly juddering, 60-Hz pictures. With movies, only experienced viewers are likely to notice this effect, but even beginners will spot it in sports broadcasts. A firmware-update might be able eliminate this problem, since the HQV chipset's de-interlacer works perfectly for both movie and TV pictures. Apart from the YUV input's strong clipping of bright image-contents, the analog interfaces offer crisp, accurate picture quality that approaches that of the HDMI inputs.

You should set HDMI sources to upscale their output to HD resolution, since the color-resolution is a little rough with standard-definition formats. Unfortunately, however, there are no aspect-ratio options for resolutions of 720p or higher, meaning letterbox movies and 4:3-format productions always appear with the wrong geometry.

Anamorphic DVDs, such as the "Lord of the Rings" adventures, display correctly and, optionally, with no overscan. Here, the warm colors of bright, summer scenes give an attractive overall impression, but the last quantum of detail is lacking. Differentiation of dark picture areas in the murky sequences of movies like "Panic Room" also fails to match the level of DLP projectors - such as the BenQ and InFocus models reviewed by Televisions.com.

HDTV:
Even with overscan deactivated, the finest structures of tricky test patterns (such as the "Pixel Phase" pattern) showed poor contrast and a pink-brown tint, which we tried in vain to eliminate using the detail and sharpness controls.

With HD movies, the Viewsonic recognizes the 24p format correctly but converts it to the slightly juddering, 60-hertz frame rate of NTSC. We only noticed this in sequences containing constant, uniform motion, such as the intro to the Bond movie "Casino Royale", where the roulette wheel turned roughly, and the red diamonds tracked across the screen with a slight stutter.

The slightly extended color gamut causes very few problems, but grayscales sometimes deviate from ideal values.

In the black-and-white scene at the beginning of the Bond movie, it becomes clear that, to increase the contrast, the automatic iris occasionally resorts to trickery. The pictures appear brighter, but show a greenish white in the beams of light from streetlamps or in the glint of metal rods. Here, therefore, the projector has sacrificed its ability to correct the color temperature, in favor of increased contrast.

In a few, critical scenes, the Viewsonic scores well with pleasingly natural colors. On the beach in "Casino Royale", for example, it reproduces the bright sunlight convincingly. In the nighttime train journey through Montenegro (Chapter 8), the automatic image controls derive astonishingly well-differentiated images, but which still look as though they've been artificially adjusted.

Those of us with big fingers will find the side-mounted control panel tricky to use.

Ideal Settings

Picture Mode: Cinema

Contrast: 60

Brightness: 55

Saturation: 50

Sharpness: 50

HQV Detail Enhancement: 5

Lamp Mode: Normal

Color Temperature: Warm 1

PCS: Off

HQV Film Mode: Auto

Black Level: Normal

Auto Iris: Off

* These settings apply to realistic playback of HDTV/Blu-ray material through the HDMI interface in a darkened environment. Manufacturing and HDMI playback device deviations may necessitate slight adjustments.