The V700G Pro’s menu offers five picture modes. Only one of the modes—Custom—offers any settings options, and I quickly discovered in my preliminary SDR testing that the only setting that needed changing isn’t on the list. All the picture modes showed enough loss of shadow detail to be noticeable, and to have any chance of fixing the problem, you’d need a traditional brightness setting to adjust the black level. With no way to improve shadow detail, even in Custom mode, I chose Movie mode for my viewing tests because it offered the best color accuracy.
Despite the shadow detail issue, the projector performed well overall for viewing SDR content in a dark room. It delivered solid contrast, nicely saturated color in brightly lit scenes, and a satisfyingly dark black in dark scenes. Color accuracy was on the mark; I didn’t see any obviously off-target hues in our standard test clips or during informal testing. It also helps that, despite the projector dropping enough shadow detail for it to be evident in both dark scenes and the dark areas in brighter scenes, I could still make out what was going on, even in the darkest scenes among our test clips.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
In my informal tests streaming from Apple+, the V700G Pro reported an HDR connection. But it didn’t do the same for 4K HDR movies on disc, and the player reported the connection as 1080p SDR in those cases. Even so, the image on the screen for HDR movies on disc offered essentially the same strengths as with SDR, plus vastly improved shadow detail, as you would expect from HDR. Based on these tests, full HDR support seems limited to streaming, but the V700G Pro appears to offer some level of HDR compatibility via the HDMI port, even without full HDR support.
This isn’t as surprising as it may seem. It’s increasingly common for newer projectors and TVs with HDMI 1.4 ports to offer workarounds to the limitations of the HDMI 1.4 spec, which doesn’t support HDR. The result in those cases gives you most of the benefits of HDR for viewing, even when the connection is technically SDR. I wasn’t able to get Vankyo to confirm whether this is it right explanation for what I saw in testing, but it likely is. More important, if you notice your hardware is reporting SDR for HDR input with the V700G Pro when using the HDMI input, you need to know it’s not an issue to waste time trying to fix.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Note that the spec sheet claims support for “red and blue 3D.” That’s actually an alternate pronunciation of “no 3D support” as projector 3D is generally defined. Literally any color display —and even printed pages—can support 3D that uses red and blue (or red and cyan) glasses. That’s not what’s usually meant by 3D support.
Image brightness in my tests using Vankyo’s Movie mode was close to what I expect from a 400 ANSI lumen rating. Using the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, that would be bright enough for a roughly 80-to-105-inch-diagonal 16:9 image on a 1.0-gain screen in a dark room. In my tests, using my preferred settings, the V700G Pro lit up my 90-inch screen with the lights off without a problem. It also delivered a suitably bright image on an 80-inch screen in a family room at night with lights on, and was even watchable at that size, though a little washed out, during the day on an overcast day.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Vankyo also bundles the V700G Pro with a 120-inch screen, but it is barely worth mentioning. It would be a reasonable size for the rated brightness, but with the settings I used for best image quality, it’s too large to give you an appropriately bright image even in a dark room. It also lacks a frame, so setting it up would be similar to setting up a bedsheet as a screen.
The input lag is suitable for strictly casual gaming. I measured it, using my Bodnar 4K Lag Tester, at 52.3 milliseconds for 1080p/60Hz input.
