Benq MP670 Projector

Full Review

The Benq MP670 is a 3D ready digital DLP projector from Benq which has a lot of things going for it. It has an HDMI v1.3 port, onboard speaker, some really cool advanced features, and projects good visuals on a wall screen. The projector's primarily aimed at businesses and schools.

Design
The Benq MP670 digital projector is 12-inch by 8.5-inch wide and about 4-inch high and weighs 2.75-kg. It has an all-black glossy exterior split into two halves on the top -- the front half near the lens has a smooth glossy finish, while near the back runs a wide strip with a finely textured finish which feels nice and premium. There are menu buttons placed on top of the Benq MP670 digital projector for manipulating it. The Benq MP670's lamp lens is placed at its front left with the manual focusing groove at the top. The Benq MP670 DLP projector has just one adjustable stand at its front bottom edge to tilt the projector's image either upward or down, and it works very well -- contrary to our experience with the Epson EH-DM3 projector's twin stands. To fan off heat from its lamp, the Benq MP670's grilled vents are situated on its left side. There are power, temperature, and lamp activity indicators placed at the top panel of the Benq MP670 projector. As expected, all the projector's connectivity ports are placed at its rear. Overall, the Benq MP670's design is pretty good and it's very well built.

The projector is impressively bright -- through DisplayMate's ANSI brightness test we measured the MP670 projector's brightness at 3034 ANSI lumens (its claimed brightness is 3200 ANSI lumens).

Hardware Specs and Features
The Benq MP670 is a digital projector based on DLP technology. It has a native XGA resolution of 1024x768 pixels. The Benq MP670 projector's rated brightness is 3200 ANSI lumens and has a 3000:1 contrast ratio. Its lamp life is claimed to be 3000 hours in Normal mode and 4000 hours in Economic or Eco mode. These basic ratings of brightness, contrast ratio, and lamp life of the Benq MP670 projector are very good compared to Top 5 Mainstream Business Projectors or the recently reviewed Epson EH-DM3 projector.

In terms of connectivity options, the Benq MP670 digital DLP projector supports most popular audio-video connectivity standards. At its rear you can find an ethernet port, Composite video (Y, L, R), Audio-in, Audio-out, mini USB, two VGA ports (to connect two computers simultaneously), an HDMI and S-Video port are at your disposal to connect a whole host of input devices to the Benq MP670 projector -- desktop, laptop, dvd player, etc. You can also find a serial connector (RS232) to connect a printer or a serial device to the Benq MP670 projector. The projector supports NTSC, PAL, and SECAM video inputs. HD resolutions up to 1080p's supported. We wished the Benq MP670 came with wireless connectivity, but otherwise its hardware specs are very good.

The Benq MP670 is a feature-rich projector to say the least. It comes with some very useful features like for example auto keystone correction -- if you move the projector around and change its angle of projection with respect to the projecting screen, the projecting image is self-adjusted within seconds on the Benq MP670 projector. Although the Benq projector's native aspect ratio is 4:3 it supports a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio which is ideal for viewing HD content. The Benq MP670 projector also supports digital zoom to zoom into a specific portion of the projecting screen. The Benq MP670 projector has a very convenient automatic wall color correction feature that compensates for the color of the wall you're projecting on (in case you don't have a white projecting screen) and self-adjusts its colors. All these features are accessible through the menu buttons arrayed on the Benq MP670 projector's top panel or through its fully-functional remote control.

Performance
We restored the projector's factory settings before benchmarking it and were quite pleased with the Benq MP670's overall performance. Through our synthetic tests the Benq projector posted some impressive numbers. The projector is impressively bright -- through DisplayMate's ANSI brightness test we measured the MP670 projector's brightness at 3034 ANSI lumens (its claimed brightness is 3200 ANSI lumens). Although its ANSI Checkerboard contrast ratio isn't as impressive as the NEC NP40 or the Vivitek D735VX projector, it is still very good at 116:1 -- the Benq MP670's full contrast ratio is much better at 506:1. The Benq MP670 projector also has immaculate color temperature -- 6500K is ideal, we recorded 6509K which is very, very good. Screen color purity and uniformity was also very good. If anything, we think, the projector's a little too bright -- subtle color shades get washed out as we deemed through DisplayMate's white level and color saturation test slides, and even dark screens aren't completely dark. But otherwise the Benq MP670 projector delivers a sharp focused image on to the projecting screen. We didn't notice any moire pattern, nor any significant screen halo or streaking while testing the Benq MP670 projector. The noise levels of the projector, throughout our testing, were quite low.

We had no trouble reading scaled fonts of various sizes and shapes, nor did we face any problems while watching movies on the Benq MP670. We switched through the projector's various user modes (presentation, dynamic, cinema, sRGB) and were happy with the image it projected on the screen. The bundled remote is good to operate from a distance of about 20 feet maximum, and it has every feature well defined on its buttons. The projector maintains its image quality and most of its brightness up to a distance of 20 feet, after which the image quality gets compromised. Also, its auto keystone correction feature allows image angle correction up to 40-degrees.

We really like the fact that the Benq MP670 comes with an HDMI v1.3 port and a decent onboard speaker -- this means you can plug a Blu-ray player (or a DVD player) directly to the Benq MP670 projector to enjoy High-def (HD) movies out of the box. We switched beween a white projecting screen and a wall color of slightly deeper shade and watching movies on both of them went well, no problems whatsoever. The onboard 10W speaker doesn't provide as great audio playback as we experienced on the Epson EH-DM3 projector but it's good enough for a small room. The Benq projector also claims to be 3D-ready but unfortunately we weren't able to test this particular feature of the projector, unfortunately.

Bottom Line

The Benq MP670 projector sells for a price of Rs. 57,500. For that price, it offers very good value for money as a business or school projector. It has excellent brightness and color reproduction, and comes with some nice features like auto keystone correction and onboard speakers.
If you want a really good home theater projector, we would still recommend the Epson EH-DM3 over the Benq MP670 because of its better onboard audio and the fact that it comes with an optical drive built in. But otherwise, if you're a businessperson in need of a very good business projector or a school teacher thinking of investing in a decent projector, you won't go wrong with the Benq MP670.