BenQ W1110s – Picture Quality

Since it’s the Football mode that most distinguishes the W1110s from the W1110, let’s begin here. Does it really bring Rooney, Vardy, Kane et al to life in your living room?

Actually, considering it’s essentially just a specially defined suite of picture settings, it’s surprisingly useful. For starters, the lamp switches into Normal mode to give the picture more punch and brightness – in recognition of the relatively colourful image content that football delivers, and the fact that many people will prefer to watch football in a room with at least some ambient light.

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Although there are projectors at this price that deliver greater brightness, the W1110s does get bright enough in Football mode to ensure the image is engaging to watch in pretty much anything but direct sunlight.

The Football mode’s colour tuning is genuinely effective, too, delivering plenty of punch for the teams’ strips while also bringing out the green of the pitch in both a dynamic and natural way. It’s free of the slightly radioactive appearance you’d expect to see with projectors that haven’t been tuned properly for video sources.

However, a downside of this preset is that it sets the image’s sharpness so high that it exaggerates the MPEG compression artefacts you’re likely to be getting from whatever source from which you’re watching football, be it a Sky box or a Freeview box. Of course, it takes only a moment to reduce the sharpness setting to resolve this issue.

With other source types, I refer you to the review of the original W1110 for in-depth picture quality analysis, since the introduction of the Football mode has had no effect on the other presets.

Briefly, though, provided you’ve made the picture setting changes I mentioned earlier, the W1110s is a superb movie machine for its money.

Colour tones are strikingly natural, balanced and nuanced for a sub-£700 projector; black levels and shadow detail achieve a pretty decent balance; and pictures are reasonably crisp and detailed. There was barely any evidence of single-chip DLP’s “rainbow effect” colour striping issue either.

A little low-level noise in dark scenes is evident, and if you use the projector’s Brilliant Colour feature on too high a setting you’ll become aware of some minor colour noise, especially over skin tones. Finally, if you’re not fairly precise with the picture settings then dark scenes can suffer with either a little greyness or a loss of shadow detail.

Most of the W1110s’s issues can be reduced or removed via the picture settings menus, however, and nothing stops the projector from being a typically strong home-entertainment performer.