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My new Toy--Sony AW15 720p LCD projector
I took the plunge this week and ordered a Sony AW15 (after much research and a bit of agonizing). This is my first HT projector (I've monkeyed around with a couple of office projectors from my wife's office, as well as the one at the college where I teach, but none of them are aimed at HT).
I took advantage of the strong Canadian dollar (or weak American dollar--your pick) and got it at a considerable savings over the best price I could find in Canada (1200$CDN including shipping vs 1560$CDN plus shipping and 6% GST), so about 400$CDN in savings.
I got home late last night with it, so I did not do very much (about an hour of viewing total).
My very initial impressions (I'll be back with more after a weekend of tweaking and movie watching--right now I have it set up with the recommended settings I found from Thomas J. Norton's review on HomeTheaterMag's website). Everything is being sent to the projector via component cable from my receiver (sources used are a Cambridge 540D and a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 DVR).
Pros:
Colours are very nice (to my admittedly non-videophile eyes)--much nicer than the other projectors that have been in my house.
Has a better de-interlacer than my DVD player (no surprise there as the 540D got good marks in interlaced mode from Secrets, as I recall, but only fair marks for prog scan).
Very quiet (to me) in low lamp mode. I've read that it isn't especially quiet compared others in its price class but compared to the office projectors I've had in the house, this thing is silent. In high lamp mode the fan can be heard (it is mounted on a stand about a foot behind my head, so in more traditional placements I expect it would be unnoticeable).
Menu is easy to understand and use (though I've not engaged any really advanced features, so this is a provisional "pro").
SD TV material--some looks fantastic (surprisingly so, as it doesn't look especially good on my SD CRT TV) and some looks mediocre (also surprising as it looks a lot better on my CRT TV than the one that looked fantastic on the projector--go figure). The great looking image is a show I recorded to DVR from Space (the Canadian sci-fi cable network). I recorded an episode of Enterprise as it is said to be among the better looking (if not necessarily always better written) sci-fi shows in recent years. On my CRT, dark scenes (from just about any show on that channel) look murky and blocky/blotchy. On the projector, no such artefacts. It looked a bit soft, overall (it's not HD, of course) but very nice. The mediocre image is an episode of the new Dr. Who on CBC (which usually looks very nice on my CRT--I may check another episode, just to be sure there wasn't some sort of broadcast problem that night, but I doubt there was). Each show is broadcast in 16:9, even in SD and while I could use the zoom feature of the projector (a pic setting, not the manual zoom of the lens itself) to fill the screen with Enterprise with a very nice picture, the same feature made Dr. Who look rather poor. In 4:3 mode, it looked reasonably ok.
Cons:
Only one so far--lens shift. It works, but not nearly to the extent I expected. I made my choice, in part, because I believed the lens shift feature would allow me to place the projector in a specific place in my room. However, upon reviewing the manual and making some more measurements, I've concluded two things--One, my calculations prior to having the projector in my house must have been based on a lack of understanding the range of the shift as described in the manual (and the Sony manual is a model of clarity compared to the BenQ when explaining the lens shift range). Clearly, though, I severely overestimated the lens shifting (I suspect there is also an offset at work that I did not know about which affected the calculations). Two, from looking at manuals for projectors which fit the budget I set for myself, NO projector has sufficient lens shift to do what I wanted, so the BenQ (or any other) would not have made a difference on that score. This is a disappointment but, in the end, a minor one as the PQ is great even on the less than optimal screen I'm using at the moment. I consider this lens shift "con" a lesson for future purchasing.
More when I've had time to really set it up to my liking.
I took advantage of the strong Canadian dollar (or weak American dollar--your pick) and got it at a considerable savings over the best price I could find in Canada (1200$CDN including shipping vs 1560$CDN plus shipping and 6% GST), so about 400$CDN in savings.
I got home late last night with it, so I did not do very much (about an hour of viewing total).
My very initial impressions (I'll be back with more after a weekend of tweaking and movie watching--right now I have it set up with the recommended settings I found from Thomas J. Norton's review on HomeTheaterMag's website). Everything is being sent to the projector via component cable from my receiver (sources used are a Cambridge 540D and a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 DVR).
Pros:
Colours are very nice (to my admittedly non-videophile eyes)--much nicer than the other projectors that have been in my house.
Has a better de-interlacer than my DVD player (no surprise there as the 540D got good marks in interlaced mode from Secrets, as I recall, but only fair marks for prog scan).
Very quiet (to me) in low lamp mode. I've read that it isn't especially quiet compared others in its price class but compared to the office projectors I've had in the house, this thing is silent. In high lamp mode the fan can be heard (it is mounted on a stand about a foot behind my head, so in more traditional placements I expect it would be unnoticeable).
Menu is easy to understand and use (though I've not engaged any really advanced features, so this is a provisional "pro").
SD TV material--some looks fantastic (surprisingly so, as it doesn't look especially good on my SD CRT TV) and some looks mediocre (also surprising as it looks a lot better on my CRT TV than the one that looked fantastic on the projector--go figure). The great looking image is a show I recorded to DVR from Space (the Canadian sci-fi cable network). I recorded an episode of Enterprise as it is said to be among the better looking (if not necessarily always better written) sci-fi shows in recent years. On my CRT, dark scenes (from just about any show on that channel) look murky and blocky/blotchy. On the projector, no such artefacts. It looked a bit soft, overall (it's not HD, of course) but very nice. The mediocre image is an episode of the new Dr. Who on CBC (which usually looks very nice on my CRT--I may check another episode, just to be sure there wasn't some sort of broadcast problem that night, but I doubt there was). Each show is broadcast in 16:9, even in SD and while I could use the zoom feature of the projector (a pic setting, not the manual zoom of the lens itself) to fill the screen with Enterprise with a very nice picture, the same feature made Dr. Who look rather poor. In 4:3 mode, it looked reasonably ok.
Cons:
Only one so far--lens shift. It works, but not nearly to the extent I expected. I made my choice, in part, because I believed the lens shift feature would allow me to place the projector in a specific place in my room. However, upon reviewing the manual and making some more measurements, I've concluded two things--One, my calculations prior to having the projector in my house must have been based on a lack of understanding the range of the shift as described in the manual (and the Sony manual is a model of clarity compared to the BenQ when explaining the lens shift range). Clearly, though, I severely overestimated the lens shifting (I suspect there is also an offset at work that I did not know about which affected the calculations). Two, from looking at manuals for projectors which fit the budget I set for myself, NO projector has sufficient lens shift to do what I wanted, so the BenQ (or any other) would not have made a difference on that score. This is a disappointment but, in the end, a minor one as the PQ is great even on the less than optimal screen I'm using at the moment. I consider this lens shift "con" a lesson for future purchasing.
More when I've had time to really set it up to my liking.
Even the "green tint" issue is something I likely would never have noticed if I'd been using a proper surface material in the first place AND I didn't hang out at so many A/V fora learning about all the ways EVERY display lacks perfection. 
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