Straight out of the box, the GP520 is set to Auto Cinema mode, which is designed to automatically control as much as possible, to the point where it leaves you with very few settings you can adjust. It won’t even let you change the power setting (labeled Brightness, because adjusting power changes brightness in lumens). Instead, Auto Cinema automatically adjusts power based on both the current ambient light level and the distance from whatever you’re using for a screen. (Greater distance means a bigger image size, which needs more lumens to maintain the same brightness.) Many people will see no reason to switch to any other mode.
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However, those who are picky or just want to experiment have other choices. The menus offer a total of six preset picture modes for SDR content (including Auto Cinema) plus a User mode, which is the only one that lets you set contrast, saturation, sharpness, hue, color temperature, and wall color. None of the modes offers a conventional brightness setting (which actually sets black level). The black level of our review unit was permanently set just a touch high. Most modes offer acceptable or better color accuracy, but in my preliminary tests, I quickly narrowed my preferred choices down to Auto Cinema and Cinema.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Between the two, Auto Cinema offered better shadow detail with default settings, but it exhibited some blue shift (which most people don’t find bothersome). Cinema offered better color accuracy. Although it didn’t hold shadow detail as well with its out-of-box settings, changing the Local Contrast Control setting from Off to Medium (which Auto Cinema uses by default) largely erased the difference on that score, giving Cinema the edge overall. For formal testing, I used Cinema with the Local Contrast Control set to High. The only other change I made was to turn off frame interpolation. Even at the default setting of Low, it still added a digital video effect.
For HDR input, the GP520’s menu offers a picture mode named after the current HDR connection type—HDR10, HDR10+, or HLG—plus a User mode in each case, and two more modes on the HDR10 list only: HDR Auto Cinema and HDR Game. For HDR10 movies on disc, the choice between HDR10 and HDR Auto Cinema was close to a toss-up, but Auto Cinema delivered a slightly brighter image overall, making it my preferred choice.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
In my formal tests with SDR input, the GP520 delivered good image quality across the board, scoring nicely on everything from color accuracy to shadow detail to contrast in both dark and bright scenes. For the HDR10 versions of the same movies, the same was true for color accuracy, shadow detail, and contrast in brighter scenes, but the darkest scenes in our test suite had middling to poor contrast. As I’ve noted in other reviews, poor performance in these scenes won’t generally be a deal breaker for most people, since few movies or TV shows have more than one or two scenes that dark, if they have any at all.
The 3D support works with DLP-Link glasses and requires manually switching to 3D mode, with choices of Top-and-Bottom, Left-Right, and Blu-ray 3D (available only when connected via HDMI and playing a Blu-ray disc). I didn’t see any crosstalk in my tests, and 3D-related motion artifacts were at the low end of typical for current-generation projectors—enough to notice, but not enough for most people to find annoying.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
In my testing, I saw a few rainbow artifacts (the red/green/blue flashes that DLP projectors can show). However, I’m pretty sensitive to them. If you don’t see them easily, you may not see them at all. Even so, if you’re concerned about seeing them, it’s always best to buy from a source that allows free returns so you can give the projector a test run yourself.
Gamers will appreciate the projector’s support for automatic low-latency mode (ALLM). Using the Game Boost setting (which turns off keystone correction to offer the shortest lag), I measured the input lag with a Bodnar 4K Lag Tester at 17.8 milliseconds (ms) for both 1080p and 4K input at 60Hz.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Note that I ran into an intermittent problem when connecting to a PC. The first time I tried, the GP520 negotiated a 1080p connection, with Windows 10 showing 1080p as the recommended choice, and giving no option for switching to 4K even in Advanced settings. Tricks like turning everything off and back on sometimes gave me a 4K connection, but not always, leaving me with no reliable way to make the problem appear or disappear. At this writing, BenQ is trying to replicate the issue so that it can address it.
