Epson Powerlite Pro G6900WU Projector - Performance 2

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Art Feierman

POWERLITE PRO G6900W PERFORMANCE PAGE 2: SHARPNESS, AUDIBLE NOISE, IMAGE NOISE, INPUT LAG TIMES

Epson G6900WU Projector: Sharpness

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No surprises here. Considering this is a WUXGA projector (1920x1280) - which is about as high as projectors go, without counting a couple of $15,000 plus 4K home theater projectors, and a few commercial 4K projectors which are many times the price, this should meet everyone's need for sharpness.

True, the Epson is a 3LCD, so 3 panels or chips, and alignment is never perfect. So, you can argue that a single chip DLP projector may appear just slightly sharper, or have a touch more depth, but the bottom line is, this projector will do a great job on hi-resolution content, be it an architectural rendering, detailed scientific charting, image reproduction, and pretty much anything else you can think to throw at it. Small text, such as emails, or labels on charts, are more than sharp enough. Let's say that the projector can resolve text far smaller than anyone would be able to read at normal seating distances from a projector.

For your consideration, a few images to demonstrate the clarity. Sharpness control was left on default which is to say, not enhancing perceived sharpness.

Audible Noise

Epson's Powerlite Pro G6900WU turns out to be reasonably quiet for a projector that is this bright. For perspective, running the G6900WU projector in its Eco mode, gets a 31 db claim from Epson. Consider that Epson claims 32 db, (a smidgin noisier) on their UB home theater projectors. Considering this G Series projector is designed to handle large screens and audiences of hundreds, that's impressively quiet.

Of course if you switch to full power, this Epson projector does get a good bit noisier, with the claim increasing to 39 lumens. That's still pretty darn good, but definitely out of the range of home theater projectors. Still a few years ago, and even today, there are many high brightness projectors in the 40-50 db range, and some of those mega bright projectors - with 20,000 lumens or so, are a lot noisier still.

There is another aspect of the noise of the G6900 WU projector. There is a dynamic iris. If it is engaged you can hear a clicking sound as it operates. It's noisier than their home theater projectors' irises, which are more rumbly. Still, the clicks aren't that loud and would not be an issue in a typical presentation, but might be heard if it's a smaller group and there's no audio with the presentation. Of course, in the brighter modes such as Dynamic or Presentation, most likely the iris would be turned off.

Image Noise

For a business projector like this Powerlite Pro G6900WU, I drop in my Silicon Optix test disc, and see what it has to say about image noise of various types.

I'll keep this simple. The Epson passed everything, with no particular issues noted. I also did double the projector to see how it worked as home entertainment. I found image noise in close ups of faces to be minimal, and skys show a good bit less mosquito noise than some DLP home theater projectors! Not bad. Panning was pretty good, even on 24fps, when I watched a few movies. The slow (troublesome) panning scene I always use from the first Red movie, was actually a little smoother, less jerky, than one of Sony's $3000+ home theater projectors.

In other words, unless perfection is the order of the day if you are doing something very creative, there should be no real issues. We did not inspect to find tiny issues, that are barely visible when looking for them.

There is the possibility therefore, for a specific application, perhaps a museum display, where there might be some image noise that is a challenge, but, at our level of inspection score the Epson as solidly good when it comes to most image noise. We only tested the Epson with default settings, so there are even a couple of image noise controls that we did not play with, that likely would help hide anything we missed, if it was crucial.

Click Image to Enlarge

G6900WU Input Lag Times

It occurred to me that this test, which we normally run for home projectors that are used by serious gamers, might be relevant to some commercial applications. For example, augmented reality/virtual reality, or high speed presentation of scientific data.

Considering that, and that Epson does make a version of this projector for home media and living rooms, I did our usual input lag measurements. The gallery shows two images. The first shows the lag with image processing on the projector set to Fine (36 bit processing - billions of colors). As you can see the lag is in the 80+ ms range. Subtract the projected image's millisecond timer from the laptop's.

The second image however, is 50 ms. That's with Image processing set to fast - which is the good old 24 bit processing with a mere 16.7 million colors. The point being that if you need the projector's fastest, just limit the color pallet to 16 million colors.

How fast is 50 ms, or 85 ms. Think this way. If you are viewing 60 fps content, the time between one frame and the next is about 16.7 ms, so 50 ms is about a 3 frame lag. Even in full color processing - a color pallet so deep, it's needed by very few, you are going to still be within 5 or 6 frames, which is to say, we're still talking less than 1/10th of a second lag.