LG AF115 - The Quality Home Cinema Projector

At this point, we came to the point where, using various film scenes and test images, we "guessed" the image production parameters of our projector (primarily we mean contrast, brightness, color accuracy). We have to make a little digression here. We didn't use a measuring device - for several reasons. On the one hand, HOC is not a magazine dealing with professional home theater technology, and on the other hand, the instrument calibration would have taken several times as long - the adjustment of the image parameters to the eye still took a good two hours. Before describing what we have achieved, it is important to state what our goal is in this kind of operation.

According to some system, the multitude of colors has to be classified, i.e. a certain standard is needed. The latter was referred to the International Commission on Illumination (Ccommission Innnationale de l´Eclairage) is due to: this organization is defined by several so-called D-series standard colors and try to depict the lighting conditions in outdoor conditions in different parts of the world; we targeted the color world most similar to the D65 (as we should do with all displays in general). The D65, which is practically behind the name 6500 K, corresponds to the daylight in the CIE diagram at 12 noon in Western Europe, and is therefore often referred to as the daylight distribution.

Coordinates of D65 in the CIE 1931 color space: x = 0.313, y = 0.329

We need to talk about something else. This is the IRE, which is practically a unit of brightness, ie we can characterize the given points of the gray scale with it. For example, IRE 0 is completely black and IRE 100 is dazzling white. It is also important to monitor the grayscale during calibration because the ideal color setting results in the three color components being present in the same proportions in each IRE. Let’s face it, this is a practically impossible venture - it’s not about the top category right now, where we can easily be successful with a little expertise - which is why the goal is to get as close as possible to this state.

Once you’ve shot the brightness and contrast for yourself, and made the magnifying adjustments for the colors as well, you may want to see the grayscale. Unfortunately, the AF115 did not perform very well in this respect. Around 80-100 IRE, the white was pink, slightly greenish in the middle, and slightly bluish below. After some fine-tuning, we managed to improve the situation, but there was another negative: the setup options for the entire intervention can be said to be poor, even in expert mode (the Panasonic PT-AE3000, which will be tested later, gives the installer three times as much freedom).

However, the end result was very good with "regular" movies and cartoons, only our expert sometimes shook his head that maybe even better could be made out of this. The image of the upscaled DVD was generally colorful, sharp and contrasty, the writer of these lines was overall pleased with the visuals.

We switched to HDTV, which means our projector received a 1080i signal this time. We switched to EuroSport HD, which of course had completely different visual features - but we didn't start the multi-hour maceration from the beginning, that wasn't the point now. The football match can be a headache for any player, so we got the battle between Japan and Australia. In the case of fast movements, we observed a small loss of resolution with a slight blur. We don't have to be scared, this production still deserves an average rating.

Finally, we set up our laptop and offered our projector with 1080p (Madagascar Pinguin Xmas and Incredible Hulk). Yes, this projector was created for this. Needle-sharp image, flawless resolution - stunning visuals, of course contributed by the 240 cm wide image size…

Good little scene for testing

Finally, we also tried to examine the "special" options. Unfortunately, since the manual is not very verbose about this (either) — essentially it only says that it improves the given parameter — so we only approached the matter at the level of an attempt. Fresh Contrast only increases the contrast by one and a half times, while activating Fresh Color did not cause any changes for us. We also looked at Auto Iris, which of course corresponds to dynamic contrast. We tried the first of his three positions, which extended the most into the picture. However, its operation could be said to be very civilized, we were absolutely satisfied with it, so we can safely leave this option on.