BENQ LU710 Business/Education Projector Review-Picture And Sound Quality

BENQ LU710 Business/Education Projector Review – Picture Quality: Color Modes, Video Quality, Text and Presentation Quality, Sound Quality

Like most BenQ projectors I have reviewed in the past, the LU710 delivered good color accuracy. As you move up the BenQ lineup, you get more resolution, better black levels, higher contrast, and more functionality but color reproduction out of the box remains consistent.

The above screen shots are intended to give only a rough idea of the color accuracy for each picture mode. However, when viewed in person the color accuracy will generally look somewhat better than shown in these photos. The images show the difference in color and skin tones, for the different preset picture modes.

The Infographic mode produces more saturated colors than the LU710’s Presentation mode and it is designed to highlight to details of text and colorful graphics utilized in many PowerPoint presentations.

There are seven factory color presets. The following observations were generally made with the projector using its factory default picture settings.

• Bright Picture Mode: This is the brightest but least accurate picture mode. This mode would be most appropriate for displaying presentation materials where color accuracy was not of great concern and the room has a large amount of ambient light.
• Presentation Picture Mode: This is the second brightest mode but it offers much better white balance and color reproduction.
• Infographic Picture Mode: Designed for projecting graphics. This picture mode has a somewhat cool (bluish) color temperature.
• Video Picture Mode: Intended for TV viewing. While fairly accurate, its color temperature was a little cooler than ideal.
• sRGB Picture Mode: While this picture mode was the least bright, it delivered the most accurate colors out-of-the-box.
• User 1-2 Picture Mode: Color reproduction and white balance are similar to the sRGB mode.

For those who want to further fine tune the LU710 color reproduction, the projector has most of the advanced color adjustments found on BenQ’s higher-end projectors including color temperature, RGB balance (contrast, brightness), and CMS.

The LU710 offers a couple of picture modes that had good picture quality. I found the best quality, in terms of color accuracy, to be the sRGB and User modes. The screen shots above were taken with the LU710 in User 1 mode. Since the LU710 includes user adjustments for white balance, gamma, and color temperature, I am sure it could be adjusted to produce a more accurate picture.

Above are screenshots of a variety of HD videos and photos. Like all our photos, they remain unadjusted for color so they do not look as good as what the projector produced.

Overall, the video picture quality was good for a bright conference room laser projector at this price point. While not perfect, the overall color accuracy was very good, with natural looking skin tones, and reasonable image contrast.

The WUXGA (1,920 x1,200) resolution of the BenQ LU710 results in good text clarity. The LU710 has more than enough resolution for viewing PowerPoint slides or Excel worksheets at a normal viewing distance.

If the font size is too fine for the LU710 to resolve, then the text is probably way too small to use in a PowerPoint presentation anyway. When I attached my PC laptop, there were very few office documents where more resolution would have been useful. If you need to look at something in more detail the LU710 has a digital image zoom feature.