Viewsonic PJD5123

Color Temperature (0.00)

The problem with having a standardized test is that sometimes, a subject scores so far out of range of any others, that the score really doesn’t apply in the usual sense. This was true of the Viewsonic PJD5123, which scored very badly on the color temperature test: so much so, that the result is zero. There’s a little more to it than this, but the bottom line is that its greyscale color consistency is poor; if you look at a greyscale gradient, you will notice some of the white shades look cyan, while darker greys can seem pinkish. This is a projector that will suffice for the occasional classroom or office presentation, but is not something on which you’d want to watch movies.

Compared to the initial cyan-tinted white that we measured, the rest of the greyscale values looked blue-tinted, which made it seem like color was inaccurate most of the time. Really, though, one could consider the bright whites to be the colors that strayed, in which case the greys would be relatively consistent around medium blue.

The results of DLP projectors, in particular, are difficult to explain, because they use nonstandardized color wheels without explaining their methods. Color settings that are mysterious on a television become technical mysticism when they’re applied to a DLP’s color wheel. Suffice it to say that however this particular model produces greys, it does so inconsistently.

We have decided to display the chart above in addition to the standard color temperature graph below, which doesn’t show color drift in the cyan-to-blue direction. The above chart shows the entire range of colors top-down, while the color temperature chart underneath is like looking at the gamut from the side; you won’t see changes that don’t go from left to right. That’s why the color temperature below is so deceptively consistent. For every shade of grey from white to black, we measured its color and made a mark on the color gamut. Most greys read blue, while whites appeared cyan.

Color Temperature

RGB Curves (8.14)

The RGB curves on the PJD5123 were good, but not great. It exhibited some problems displaying transitions, manifest in the color strips below as bands of color. The gradient should look smooth, but it’s far from perfect. If all you want to do is show off the sweet gradient you’ve applied to a bar graph, this projector will do an acceptable job at it.

RGB Curves

Color Gamut (3.43)

The PJD5123 does not exactly adhere diligently to rec. 709 standards. Its white point ends up deep in cyan, and its blue and green points are extremely oversaturated. Blue ends up looking purple. Most televisions oversaturate their colors a little bit, but this is certainly worse than usual. This is not a projector intended for cinema-quality color fidelity.

Color Gamut

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