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Even three or four years ago the Vivitek Qumi Q7 portable projector could have been called unique. Not only does it have a claimed running time of three tens of thousands of hours, but it also has a media player and other technical “frills” on board and it clearly goes beyond its assigned role as “Projector for Education”. And now I want to not only study the set of its technical characteristics, but also conduct real “tests in the field.
Well, let’s begin. I set up my first session by placing the projector on an old box. With the first rays on the screen the settings menu opened, I did not read the manual, the attractive icons explained everything: here video, there photo and music, WEB, Wi Fi, documents, settings – everything scrolls in a circle and clicks effortlessly. Special thanks to the designers for intuitive navigation. Spin together?
The functions go round and round: the Initial Navigation menu in different positions
First let’s scroll through all the display modes: you can choose from six fixed modes: “Movie”, “TV”, “Presentation”, “Bright”, “Game”, “sRGB” and two individual modes: “Personal” and “Personal 1”. The last two will be especially interesting for cinephiles, who are in the habit of adjusting a new film for their beloved. Other modes are fully ready for the corresponding content. To avoid confusion, let’s make it clear that the fixed settings are Brightness and Contrast, and if you go into Advanced mode, you’ll be able to adjust the color temperature. settings, then Sharpness, Gamma Correction color shades and Color Temperature can be tweaked in any direction and the projector will remember these settings..
Entering the display mode, you can adjust several important parameters of the image, going to the finer settings in manual or automatic mode.
Even in the preset display modes you can fine-tune three of the five main parameters responsible for image quality: sharpness, color temperature and gamma correction.
After soloing through several modes I noticed the following pattern: the color temperature of the picture even in the “cool” mode visually gives a rather warm hue to the colors. I suspect that this is the “birthmark” of LED technology – slightly “warm up” the image. However, it’s hard to see a criminal aspect to this, because in the Personal1 and Personal2 modes you can adjust the image to almost any eye and taste.
Moving on,
Clicking on the neighboring tabs Parm 1 and Parm 2
– Here are the general settings for the projector.
In the menu with the gears, “Param. 1” opens the choice of signal source, projection forward or backward , frame format, digital Zoom, audio and one more interesting setting, which is not often found in portable projectors so far.
Additional settings 1 and 2 lay out the whole solitaire of service functions, including button locks and projector access.
As we can see
,
Basic settings are standard, but there’s a fun little tweak: auto-tuning keystone function. Apparently, the Qumi Q7 has a built-in gyroscope that commands the processor to align the image to the edges if the projector is lifted on its front feet or, conversely, looked down from above while suspended. I have played with this service, I can testify that autocorrection of trapezium at a reasonable tilt works pretty good, but it is better not to abuse this function too much.
Contents of the next tab “Steam. 2” seemed superfluous at first – everything is already set up, what is missing?
Auto source signal selection and auto white balance calibration turned out to be a noteworthy function.
Since the intriguing menu opened, I tried to put the projector into “economy” mode. First time, second time… The LED certainly damped down, but the fan was unhappily raising its voice every time. Strange effect: it seems that less light means less heat and cooling fan should dim, but it starts buzzing.
After a spin round the projector I recollected such a trick: when you switch on the conditioner, it is especially noticeable in the quiet of the night, at first it drums like crazy, and then, spinning up,
gradually
goes quiet,
inviting you to sleep soundly.
..
Isn’t there a catch: the fan in economy mode is so noisy. which is a bit of a letdown? The question arises: with a claimed life of 30,000 hours which is almost 4 years on , is it necessary for the fan to make unnecessary noise in economy mode?..
If you fall into the “Advanced 1”, you can set the location of the menu, its transparency, you can “play” with the cooling system. But frankly, I found this setting to be redundant, since the LEDs already reduced the cooling problem to less than.
The second group
“advanced 2”
sleep timer was found. One can, of course, slander that such an important service is mainly needed by those who want to watch everything they can find in a nine-storey house. But on the other hand, if we attach a small TV tuner to the projector we get a natural TV with a sleep timer.
It was also interesting to delve into the automatic white color correction. Such an operation for a portable “traveler” is very relevant. Wherever it lands, in any hiking conditions, on any rough wall, the white balance adjusts in seconds.
So, we navigated easily and effortlessly.
The main advantage of the menu is that it is not a huge curly tree with
countless levels
.
On the contrary, the menu structure is logical, convenient and understandable even for a blonde.
Projector beam with a business visit
Quite often we have to make presentations “on the other side” – in the offices of our partners. It is already extremely inconvenient to be limited by the screen of the hiking laptop. And the “light cavalry” in the face of Q7 is a real godsend!
Having recorded a presentation and a PDF file with the statistics report on a flash drive, we brilliantly reproduced it all on the opposite wall. And the size of the projected screen was changed three times – from small to large. This is a case where size doesn’t matter – on any screen, the pages instantly opened clear, rich in color. Trapezoidal distortions, caused by a slight release of the front legs and noticeable to the eye in the first seconds, quickly smoothed out.
Just in case, we used auto-calibrated white balance to neutralize the beige color of the presentation wall. The picture came out like a glossy magazine. Especially in modes “Presentation” and “sRGB”, and other modes “Movie”, “Game” and others are clearly paler friendly with our wall-screen. This is how it should be, since presentation settings emphasize image brightness and contrast, not the number of colors.
When we copied the content of the flash drive to the built-in hard drive,
A second round with the same presentation
turned out to be just as successful. The files flew like a bullet. We made about 50 attempts – only the extensions flashed: exels, word, power point, pdf, jpeg, gif.
Reading the animated gif format allows you to get a close-up view of new banners for the site and discern any absurdities in it, which in the normal format slip out of sight..
We could have skipped the next viewing, but the highlight of our presentation tour is a live demonstration of btest’s capabilities. And you can’t do without an internet connection.
So, the connection to Wi Fi was in the normal mode, that is in a few seconds, through a special module-flash. We accessed the site through the built-in proprietary browser. For the presentation of the site it was especially handy – you can keep the laptop without having to carry it all around New York. And also, between presentations, you can visit on-line cinemas straight from the projector.
It remains to mention that the site pages via Wi Fi from 4G were loaded almost instantly and looked like on a calibrated high-definition panel. Tired eyes didn’t want to go back to the notebook..
So it is easy to integrate into any network by connecting to a tablet, smartphone or office Wi-Fi. Connection is no different than what we normally do on a home or work network. Setting up is standard and does not take much time.
The wall across the street was fine with it
It was late in the evening and we were glad to test the office wall for artistic taste by obtaining a couple of Hollywood movies. The screen on the wall was as big as possible, more than a meter and a half diagonally.
The great 8 gig comedy “The Truman Show” ran straight from the flash drive, eight gigs read surprisingly easily.
However, a heavier 35 GB BD remux connected from an external hard drive didn’t want to be read directly and got hung up. But the action film “The Rise of Cobra” was easily replayed from an external source, the “people’s” Dune HD Lite 53D player.
In our minds, the on-board player did not look like a rental leader, because TV video doubles, and just players, have taught us to hope for the best, and to get as always. But not this time. All the announced video formats were run in reasonable volumes.
The projector showed Hollywood masterpieces in the preset “Movie” mode. While we were not carried away by the story, we were attentively watching the details, the dynamics, the naturalness of daytime colors and the shades of nighttime. The black sky from the balcony seemed bottomless and clear, and the stellar celestial dust radiated the almost lifelike light of other worlds .
In the course of the movie, we clicked the remote control for different modes. Definitely, for a movie session from the projector, the best modes are “Movie” and “Game”. Film” mode was set in soft tones, with carefully reduced saturation and warm color palette. From the point of view of a person on the sofa the picture was perceived without any tension, in dynamic scenes the colors were not atomized following the rushing object, the sharp movements on the screen were reproduced as in real life, naturally and smoothly, without any jerks
I remember the following scene: next to the hero in the car salon there was a relaxed blonde in a white headdress, with blond locks fluttering out from under it, leaving no doubt about it – one hair to one hair, you can count them all… Such detail is possible due to the accurate color reproduction and excellent color texture.
You might even think that this projector uses LCD technology as well – the picture is clear and there are no extraneous “fogs” – unless, of course, there are any on the source. But when you see a complexly textured image with a lot of colors on the screen you realize the DLP-technology is being used – a trained eye can feel the difference.
In 15 minutes we forgot about the important mission of video experts: great movie, big screen, only lack of beer for the cool test..
We could have watched The Truman Show in game mode. But richer, brighter colors look much more effective when there are dragons flying all over the wall, spewing napalm – here is where higher sharpness and better elaboration of space are more appropriate. So the explosive episodes left no options in their aftermath..
By the way, to use the projector instead of a game monitor to defeat all the dragons in the world&rlm, turned out to be the most worthwhile idea. Laptop with SKYRIM game&rlm we connected both through VGA and through HDMI – the dragons were equally convincing. Good that we didn’t have time to get 3D for the test, otherwise the dragon could have bitten us..
And that music played and danced and all the files were good..
The sound test was remembered when we ran out of movies. We have watched movies with the help of Sven computer speakers, they banged pretty good and in all the right places. More experienced audiophiles would not be lazy to pull up and more decent Hi Fi acoustics, the banging would be even more natural.
But it is possible not to pull up anything – the built-in 2 watt speakers will work perfectly in any office or camping conditions.
There was a DJ surprise waiting for us with the sound source. The built-in player reads not only MP3’s, but APE and FLAC files, including digitized vinyl, which some “iron” players didn’t take. And the sound files made the frequency bars on the wall bounce. And they were glad. What a surprise – jumping video with color music and all this on the background of the screeching digitized vinyl…
Come back for more tests and charts
I think the Qumi Q7 projector’s specialisation is now completely clear. It would be very useful for our editorial office for mobile and light presentations, not to have to carry a laptop around town. In free time from work a novelty could organize exclusive film screenings of new blockbusters – you can home, you can in the office or at the cottage in the evening. There’s more entertainment for the broader family. But there is another target audience – home theater gourmets who don’t take the word of novelties. Nothing can be done without diagrams, tables and test measurements.
If you have to do it, let’s do it. And it will be a fair instrumental test.
Read on, we’ll post it soon..
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What are the specific features and performance of the Vivitek Qumi Q7 projector that make it suitable for midnight users?
What kind of issues are the midnight users of the Vivitek Qumi Q7 projector reporting?
What are the specific advantages of using the Vivitek Qumi Q7 projector at midnight, according to the experiences shared by users?