Viewsonic PJD6531w

Throw (3.70)

One of the fundamental properties of a video projector is throw, which is the distance that the projector has to be from the screen to produce a particular sized image. The smaller the angle that it projects with, the further it has to be from the screen. On projectors like the PJD6531w, this is a range of distances because the zoom lens provides some flexibility. We found that this projector had a decent throw range: to fill an 80-inch diagonal screen, it has to be between 9 feet 8 inches and 10 feet 3 inches, which provides some degree of flexibility in mounting the projector.

	ViewSonic PJD6531w Required Distance for Screen Size
	64-inch screen	80-inch screen	100-inch screen	120-inch screen	140-inch screen
Wide Angle	6ft 10in	8ft 7in	10ft 9in	12ft 11in	15ft 1in
Telephoto	8ft 3in	10ft 3in	12ft 10in	15ft 5in	17ft 11in

Screen Brightness

The further the projector is placed away from the screen, the bigger the image is going to be. But it is also going to be dimmer, which will be an issue if there is more than a slight amount of ambient light in the room you are viewing in. While this projector could produce a nice bright image on a 60-inch screen, it is going to be a lot dimmer on a bigger screen. If you were to try and use this projector with a 140-inch screen, you would get a very dim image, as the numbers below show.

	ViewSonic PJD6531w Projector brightness
64-inch screen	2807 lux
80-inch screen	1796 lux
100-inch screen	1150 lux
120-inch screen	798 lux
140-inch screen	587 lux

The second chart shows our recommendations for the maximum size of screen that could be used in a variety of lighting conditions, such as a darkened room or a well-lit conference room. Basically, this projector could be used on a smaller screen in well-lit conditions, but with a screen bigger than 80 inches or so, it would be too dim to be easily visible in moderate lighting.

	ViewSonic PJD6531w Screen Visibility for Screen Size and Room Brightness
	64-inch screen	80-inch screen	100-inch screen	120-inch screen	140-inch screen
Darkened Room	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Dimly Lit Room	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Moderate Lighting	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Bright Lighting	Yes	Yes	No	No	No

While you might be prepared to put up with a rather dim image in a very dark room, it is not going to work in a well lit one: the ambient light will drown out the image. That is what we show below; how the image looks projected onto our 80-inch test screen with a number of different levels of ambient light. As you can see, the image looks okay at the lower levels, but it starts to fade and is almost unviewable at the highest level, which is 1500 lux, about what you would get in a typical office or meeting room.

	Ambient Light Performance Comparisons
	ViewSonic PJD6531w	Epson Home Cinema 705HD	Optoma HD66	Canon LV-8310
Darkened Room (10 lux)
Dimly Lit Room (15 lux)
Moderate Lighting (500 lux)
Bright Lighting (1500 lux)

Screen Materials

You don’t always get the luxury of being able to project onto a nice screen; sometimes you have to use whatever is on the walls. So, we test the performance of the projector shining onto four materials: two painted walls (one grey, one cream), wood paneling and a glossy dry erase whiteboard. We found that the ViewSonic did a decent job here: the image was bright enough in moderate light to be visible on the wood paneling and the different paints. The projector also includes a three modes designed to adapt for different materials (whiteboard, greenboard and blackboard), and we found these to be effective with the appropriate materials. There is no way, though, to easily adapt the image color settings to compensate for a non-white surface.

Optical Issues (8.50)

We found that the zoom lens of the PJD6531w did not introduce many issues: the projected pixels were sharp in the center and edges of the image across the zoom range. There was a very slight softness in the far corners of the image with the lens at is widest setting, but this wasn’t a major issue. The keystone correction did introduce some issues, though: there was a lot of stair-stepping on straight lines that was rather visible even at the smaller keystone settings.

Image Sharpness

Video Processing (2.00)

The PJD6531w offers a number of features designed to improve the video quality. We found that the only useful one of these is the BrilliantColor, which can boost the brightness of the whites, but at the cost of color accuracy.

Setting	Claimed Function	Our Impression
White Board	For white projection screen type.	Boosts the saturation and brightness of colors to make them more visible.
Black Board	For black projection screen type.	Boosts darker colors for extra visibility
Green Board	For green projection screen type.	Shifts colors to red to compensate for background
DCR (Dynamic Contrast Ratio)	will further enhance contrast ratio by darkening the black scenes	Makes dark scenes darker, loosing low light details and creating the impression of a wider contrast ratio. However, image quality is affected.
BrilliantColor	Produce an expanded on-screen color spectrum that delivers enhanced color saturation for bright, true-to-life images.	Works well for presentations and the like by boosting the brightness of the projector, but makes some colors (such as skin tones) overly bright. Not reccomended for video sources.

Formats (10.00)

The PJD6531w is a WXGA projector, which means it has a native resolution of 1200 by 800 pixels. It can display images at different resolutions, though, ranging from standard definition signals (from both analog and digital sources) right up to 1080p high definition signals. It can also work with 24 frames per second signals, as well as 25 and 50 frames per second signals generated by devices that use the PAL video system used in Europe.

Read Reviews of Comparison Products
Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 705HD	Optoma HD66	Canon LV-8310