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May 2012

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Video Review: Digital Projection E-Vision WXGA 600 Projector

This new DPI unit has a color correction menu typically reserved for projectors costing five times as much.

by Kris Rinas

Digital Projection's new E-Vision WXGA 600 projector is the most versatile single-chip DLP unit I have seen to date. It is extremely quiet and bright. The user-changeable four- and six-segment color wheels are amazing, allowing you to dial in just the right amount of performance needed for each unique presentation environment. The price point, at $5,995 MSRP, is $15,000-$20,000 less than comparable projectors currently on the market. Needless to say, I was highly impressed with the E-Vision projector. Let's take a more detailed view.

From the outside, the E-Vision has a simple, sturdy, elegant black rectangular metal case with the white Digital Projection logo on top. The locations of the lamp and color wheel access door and input panel have been well engineered. The door to the lamps and color wheel is on the top of the projector, allowing very easy maintenance access for either table-top or ceiling-mounted installations. The input panel is on the side and includes all common consumer and professional inputs.

This unit is amazingly quiet, so quiet in fact, the first time I turned it on I had to walk up to the projector to verify that it was running. To illustrate how quiet it is, I took noise measurements starting at one foot from the back exhaust fans with a reading of 53.3 dB; at five feet it was 41.4 dB, and at 10 feet it was 38.3 dB. When you run the projector in ECO mode or in single-lamp mode, the projector gets so quiet you can hardly hear it. To put this in perspective, the room I was testing in has a noise floor (naturally occurring room noise) of 36.6 dB. For comparison our currently installed projector in the same room registers 64.8 dB from one foot behind the exhaust fan.

While the low noise and simplistic, elegant design of the projector are nice, image performance is obviously what really matters and this is where the projector really shines.

All of the single-DLP projectors I have previously examined are not completely capable of reproducing the full color spectrum of red, blue and especially green. The trade off in reproducing the full color spectrum from a single-chip unit is lumen output, or as we say, brightness. With the E-Vision you have the option of deciding which color wheel you want to select. In single-chip DLP projectors, the color wheel is core to the imaging process. It is used to convert the white light into individual colors. In most single-chip units the color wheel is fixed or very difficult for the end-user to access. The ability for end-users to change the color wheels in the E-Vision is huge-especially when you need to color match it with existing three-chip DLP or LCD projectors within the same environment.

Since this projector comes with the two color wheels, I treated the testing as if it were two separate units, performing each of the tests for each color wheel. To verify the colors and calibration of the projector, I used a professional calibration system we have for color matching our onsite projectors. Once the calibration was complete, I connected a Blu-ray player and watched clips from four different movies. The unique nature of each clip really highlighted the projector's strengths and weaknesses.

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Kris Rinas is director of video systems for Grace Community Church in Noblesville, Ind.