Projection Heaven

September 18th, 2008 -- by David Birch-Jones
Source: Playback

Color Temperature: 6500°
Gamma: Film
Picture Mode: Movie 1
Dynamic Black: Off

Performance

	Detail	Color	Blacks	Shadow Detail	Artifacts/Noise
(Blu-Ray) Curse Of The Golden Flower	Clear and crisp enough to see that while the movie is visually stunning, the Blu-ray transfer has some MPEG encoding-related noise.	Wow, just wow. From the ornate costumes to the incredibly decorated palace in the Forbidden City, the Samsung simply shines, delivering rich color without embellishment.	Chapter 6 features the doctor’s wife swathed from head to toe in black chenille fabric, and the Samsung displays all of the subtle elements of the costume.	The next chapter features the emperor receiving counsel in a darkened room, with the other character wearing an ornate black mesh headdress, beneath which the Samsung clearly reveals the actor’s hairline.	MPEG-related speckle noise, which unfortunately mars an otherwise visually stunning film—but that’s not the fault of the Samsung.
(DVD) The Incredibles	At the top of my list of favorite DVDs to use when checking out displays, this superb production and excellent transfer show that the Samsung does a very good job of deinterlacing and upconversion, retaining all of the movie’s fine detail.	Here again, the Samsung’s outstandingly accurate colorimetry provides rich luscious color, but without unnecessary exaggeration.	Chapter 2 begins with Mr. Incredible and his best man Mr. Freeze dressed in tuxedos for the wedding, and the deep black detail and quality is as good as it gets.	In Chapter 6, a nighttime scene of Mr. Incredible and Mr. Freeze in a car reveals abundant shadow detail of the auto’s interior.	None noted.
(HDTV) NBC Nightly News	With the Samsung set to 1:1 pixel-for-pixel mode, the projector shows all of the fine detail in anchorman Brian Williams’s tailored suit without artifacts.	Natural-looking flesh tones of Mr. Williams and on-set guests show that the innate post-calibration colorimetry accuracy of the Samsung is as good as you’ll ever see.	Mr. Williams likes his suits on the dark side, often charcoal gray or black. Here the Samsung shows its prowess by revealing the dark color tones of his suits.	Easy to see details in the darkly-lit background of the news studio.	None noted.

Conclusion

The SP-A800B is a textbook example of proper video design. All too often, video display engineers get a tad “creative,” looking for ways to differentiate their products, with the resulting efforts veering far from the established technical standards. In this case, the SP-A800B is a stunning performer because it adheres to those standards and simply defines the state-of-the-art in single chip DLP front projection. Expensive it is, but even at its price, the value equation is entirely reasonable, given the projector’s exceptional performance in all key areas, wanting for none. I only wish that the SP-A800B was equipped with anamorphic lens compatibility, which is nothing more than a simple vertical stretch mode, a feature that’s easily implemented and is available on numerous other projectors, even on models costing a fifth of the SP-A800B’s price.

Samsung SP-A800B 1080p DLP Projector

Projection Heaven

Performance

Conclusion