Canon’s Realis WUX7000Z has the power to light up a mid-sized house of worship with pure laser light.
While many laser projectors are too big, expensive and power-hungry for a mid-sized house of worship, others are too small to put sharp, vivid video onto the big screen. Like Goldilocks’s bowl, chair and bed, Canon’s Realis WUX7000Z Pro AV Laser LCOS Projector can be just right for all but the biggest of churches.
With 7,000 lumens of illumination, sophisticated optics and a wide assortment of connection options, the WUX7000Z can really light up a service. It uses the familiar Canon projector blueprint: three 0.71-inch liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) reflective imaging targets that deliver the full color gamut in WUXGA (1,920 by 1,200) resolution. The company’s AISYS optics engine reduces chromatic aberration, banding and ghosting without lowering the projector’s light output or its 4,000:1 contrast ratio.
Inside look
Inside, the combination of a powerful blue diode laser, a yellow phosphor wheel and an intricate array of lenses and reflectors to project its image. It not only uses less power and runs cooler that traditional lamp-based projectors, it will never need a replacement lamp. The rated life of 20,000 hours of use adds up to 25 years if it has a duty cycle of 15 hours a week.
The WUX7000Z may be the flagship, but Canon also sells a variety of projectors that use traditional mercury vapor lamps, including the WUX7500 model for a mid-sized churches. There are also projectors that deliver 5,800 and 6,700 lumens.
With six Canon lenses available for the WUX projector family, it can fit into any church geometry. In addition to standard-, long- and ultra-long throw zoom lenses, there’s a short fixed focal length lens as well as short- and ultra-short throw lenses for oddly shaped sanctuaries where the projector needs to be set up next to its screen. They cost between $800 and $3,500.
It all adds up to a projector that is 7.7 by 19.0 by 21.4 inches and weighs 37 pounds. It’s a little larger but a few pounds lighter than Panasonic’s PTDZ780BU dual-lamp projector and will require at least two to install. It can be used for back-projection, aimed straight down for special effects and only requires two feet of clearance around the intake and exhaust vents for cooling.
The projector’s four feet are adjustable and can be unscrewed, yielding attachment points for mounting the projector on a ceiling. Canon sells sturdy mounting brackets, but the WUX7000Z works just as well with generic mounting hardware.
On the side of the WUX7000Z is a simple control panel that can turn the machine on and off, change the source, adjust the focus and zoom level of the lens as well as open and navigate through its Menu. There are LEDs that show the projector is in standby mode, running and a slew of warnings for the light source and overheating.
In the back is an excellent assortment of connection ports that include an HDBaseT networking jack, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA video ports. It has WiFi networking built in. While it has a one-watt speaker, the WUX7000Z will almost certainly be set up with an external sound system through the projector’s audio-in and -out jacks.
In addition to a jack for using an audio cable to wire the remote control to the projector, there are USB and an RS-232 serial port connectors for linking with a computer and controlling the projector. Unfortunately, the WUX7000Z does without a cover to hide its warren of cables.
It took a few minutes to install the standard throw RS-SL01ST lens, mount the projector and fire up its 13 built-in test patterns. They range from standard color bars to a focusing target to a stairstep image, helping to streamline aiming and optimizing the image. The RS-SL01ST Standard lens has a powered focus, 1.5X zoom and can create images between 40 and 600 inches.
Aiming the projector is eased with the WUX7000Z’s mechanical image shifting that can move it up to 10% right or left while lowering it by 15% or raising it by 55%. If the projector needs to be angled to the screen, it can also adjust for keystone distortion of up to 20-degrees, horizontally and vertically.
After setting up the projector, I tried its six projection modes that include Standard, Dynamic, Video, Photo/sRGB, Presentation and Dicom Sim. If you dig into the controls, you can adjust its parameters for just about any environment and add five personal presets.
Happily, like other installation projectors, the WUX 7000Z can set up split screen viewing using two inputs to show things like the pastor next to a scripture reference. On the downside, it’s not available for all combinations of inputs.
In addition to remote operations via PJLink, Crestron or AMX control systems, the WUX7000Z comes with a small but powerful remote control. It not only lets you focus and zoom, but select the source, call up a test pattern and use split-screen. It uses two AAA batteries and has a 25-foot range.
The WUX7000Z gets to full brightness in 56.0 seconds and took 14.7 seconds to fully shut down and turn its fan off. Like many other installation projectors, it can be turned on and off via a simple light switch. I used it with everything from an Apple Macbook and Microsoft Surface Pro 3 to an iPad, DVD player and a Gefen eight-way matrix video switcher.
The WUX7000Z’s Presentation mode was its brightest at 6,850 lumens, just short of Canon’s 7,000-lumen spec. That’s slightly above the WUX500ST’s 6,630 lumen output but well behind the Panasonic PT-DZ13K’s 13,100 lumens of light. The Standard, and Video modes deliver the best color balance but lower its output 22% and 32%, respectively.
With all it does, the WUX7000Z is surprisingly quiet at 42.7 DBA of fan noise from 36 inches away. Its exhaust was reasonable at 119.5 degrees Fahrenheit, although the case never got above 89 degrees F. By comparison, Canon’s lamp-based WUX500ST topped out at 152 degrees Fahrenheit.
Wrap up
Canon’s illumination hardware is among the most efficient and used 517 watts while projecting and 0.2-watts at idle. Including replacing the $115 dust filter every other year, its annual operating expenses add up to $132.50, assuming the projector is used for 15 hours a week and power costs 13 cents per kilowatt-hour (the national average). That’s roughly one-third the cost to run a lamp-based projector of similar output, making the WUX7000Z cheap to keep.
Like other Canon projectors aimed at houses of worship, the WUX7000Z comes with a five-year or 12,000-hour warranty that includes Canon’s Advanced Warranty Exchange Service Program and Service Loaner Program. At $8,500 with the standard lens, the WUX7000Z costs what the typical lamp-based projector of its abilities would have just a few years ago. The bonus is its longevity and low operating expenses.
The pay-off of the WUX7000Z is that without the hassle and expense of replacing the lamp every year or two, it will just run and run, becoming a quiet but essential part of the congregation.
