Canon Realis SX50 LCOS Projector

Great for High-Res HD Content, But Not for SD Video

By Pete Putman

June 1, 2005    Source: Studio Monthly

Canon’s Realis SX50 is the least-expensive LCOS front projector available today—it’s yours for a measly four grand. LCOS is a great choice if you routinely give presentations that include video and text. The Realis uses SXGA+ (1400 x 1050) imaging panels, enhanced by Canon’s proprietary AISYS Engine, and can accommodate a wide range of PC and video signals including 720p and 1080i HD, which are letterboxed on the 4:3 aspect ratio display.

Thanks to the AISYS technology, the SX50 has illumination to spare with a brightness specification of 2500 lumens, but it weighs less than 10 pounds. The supplied zoom lens has a relatively long 1.68:1 zoom ratio, which is handy when you are matching up the projection throw and image size. But the internal 1-watt mono amplifier isn’t much good in a large room.

The Realis SX50 provides a few useful menu options, including selectable gamma, RGB drive controls, digital image zoom (sorry, no mechanical lens shift), a DVI input that doubles as an analog RGB connection, and an RGB connection that can be configured as an RGB loop-out to a monitor.

The SX50 comes doggone close to its claimed brightness spec when running in Presentation mode, delivering 2472 ANSI lumens. For best color quality, however, you’ll want to choose Standard mode and tune up the grayscale for D6500 white balance. After I did just that, I measured brightness at 1780 ANSI lumens with 165:1 ANSI contrast and 334:1 peak contrast. Selecting the Quiet lamp mode drops both fan noise and image brightness (the latter by about 23 percent).

Image quality with HD sources and high-resolution PC content is very good. The high fill factor for LCOS pixels (over 90 percent) means you won’t see any screen door effect, as you would with a conventional LCD projector. Motion is smooth and the presentation is film-like. Once calibrated, the Realis SX50 tracks a pretty consistent grayscale from black to white, particularly at 40 perecent gray and up.

On the Downside

Although the projector is clearly designed for high-res presentations, the composite video decoding is simply inadequate, with plenty of chroma artifacts and loss of SD picture detail above 300 lines. The Realis SX50 does have a Progressive scan mode, but it didn’t appear to be working very will on the review model. I saw plenty of scan line artifacts and jaggies while using composite, S-video and component 480i test patterns. SD titles in particular had plenty of aliasing.

Switching to 480p mode from my DVD player cleaned up the scan line problems, but not the video scaling artifacts. It’s quite a jump from 704 x 480 to 1400 x 1050, and the Realis SX50 isn’t up to the task. Use an external video scaler with this projector if you want to watch SD video on a regular basis, particularly 3:2 material—the projector doesn’t pick up and correct for 3:2 content very well.