Viewsonic PJD5123

Motion Smoothness (4.88)

There was basically no motion processing on the Viewsonic PJD5123. Objects juddered blockily across the screen as though they were pages of a flipbook, if flipbooks also showed objects turning green on one side and purple on the other. Flipbooks don’t cause rectangles to shear into parallelograms as they move, either, as this projector did. In conclusion, if motion is your concern, flipbooks might be a budget alternative.

Motion Artifacting (6.00)

When scaled from a 1080p signal instead of the PJD5123’s native 800 by 600, the pixels smeared in a way that improved smoothness, but caused problems with artifacts. False coloration still lined the borders of moving objects in purple and green. This stems from the DLP technology and its color wheel, like the “rainbow effect.” This projector did not seem to elicit as much rainbow as other DLPs, but if might still cause problems if you’re sensitive.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps

Sources encoded at 24 frames per second looked awful on this projector. Apart from an initial strobe, there were no serious processing errors. Moving high-frequency patterns still looked atrocious, though, with crawl and horizontal static. Moving stadium seats, which are usually more forgiving, exhibited crazy, rainbow waves. This is likely due to keystone, resolution, and motion problems, but there is unfortunately no way to say how 3:2 pulldown would look without these issues.

Resolution scaling (3.00)

Resolution scaling on the PJD5123 was quite bad, due largely to the keystone. Wavy lines of distortion blossomed out from the bottom of the screen and wreaked havoc on high-frequency patterns. Resolution processing was bad to begin with, with some Moiré patterns reduced to a series of vertical lines in 1080p. Sharp lines were blurry in 720p, but 1080p was worse, rife with horizontal, staticky lines. For a budget projector, this one can get the point across, but it can’t do much beyond that.

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