Viewing Evaluation – HDTV and Movies

I found that when sitting the appropriate distance from the screen (about 2x the screen width) the picture was typically vibrant, lifelike and enjoyable. This is a nice system, despite all the tech talk of deinterlacing, pixel resolution and scaling. The bottom line is how does it look with movies, and I felt that, overall, it did very well indeed.

DVD: The Fifth Element (Superbit)
I pulled up my favorite movie and loaded it into the slotted drive of the DV11. The first thing I noted was that resolution and detail were a tad lacking due to the scaling of the system and its 800x600 resolution. Screen door effect (seeing the pixels on the projector screen) was very evident on the 80-inch screen unless you were about 11-12 feet away. At that distance, the picture looked much better and any resolution issues seemed to disappear. The goal with this system is to get behind it. If you can put the projector in front of you, it is likely that you will be much more pleased with the picture quality. Plus, if you utilize the on-board speakers, you'll be in a better position to hear them in the proper frame of reference. Once I had myself positioned properly I noticed that the colors really popped off the screen and the image had a very nice depth to it. Black levels were good, but not great - with a little ambient light in the room being a likely scenario for this system it probably won't be an issue.

DVD: The Incredibles
It's hard to make The Incredibles look anything other than stellar, and the DV11 did as we'd expect. Colors were vivid and the animation looked wonderful on our 80-inch Elite Screens system. If you look at the battle robot scene below, you'll note that there is a lot of detail in the black levels. This is because I was able to get a consistent value from 0-40 IRE which brought out the details in the shadows and made sure they were visible to the viewer. There are a lot of intricate textures in this film and it was nice to see them pop out with the MovieTime DV11.

Conclusion

The DV11 is a successful lifestyle product. It makes for about the simplest portable entertainment system available on the market today. You pop it out, pull up (or down) a screen - and go. Nothing could be simpler and nothing could be more family-friendly. For that reason alone I'd recommend this product. If you are looking for benchmark performance in a projector or would like a dual-use system for office presentations and home use there are other choices that may fare better in our benchmark testing. Though I'd like to see solid 16:9 chips in any future models (the main and perplexing downside of this unit) I was pleased overall with the performance of the DV11 given its intended use.