ViewSonic Pro9000 Pro Reviews

If the new projector shows up with the fixes promised, and some better color I'm going enjoy having a hybrid lightsource I can recommend. This is a projector that will be more at home in a theater than a livingroom, based on lumens. Still, the Pro 9000 projector has enough brightness to work in more of a family room environment as long as you don't go too large on screen. Movies can certainly look good at night, and sports can work in the daytime with some ambient light. Today, thanks to 3D capable projectors needing extra brightness, most of those are simply a brighter proposition for a livingroom family room. Those others do a better job when messing with ambient light, whether that light is inherent to the room, or because sometimes - like with sports and friends, you just don't want the room dark. I owned a JVC projector in my old family room with rust colored walls. It had less than 900 lumens at maximum, and I got by fine with a 128" diagonal screen. With that in mind, if the value proposition of this Viewsonic Pro 9000 projector makes sense, know it can work in those "lighter" rooms than a dedicated theater.

The ViewSonic Pro9000 home theater projector offers enough to justify its price, but lacks features you might expect, including 3D support, frame interpolation, and conveniences like lens shift.

As a technology development, Laser Hybrid LED has a lot going for it. It’s only marginally more expensive than similarly specified LCD and DLP models, and its colour performance is striking. However on the Pro9000 it’s not quite bright enough to function well in a moderately lit room and blacks still have some way to go before they’re Dark Knight approved. Whether the lack of 3D will prove an additional deterrent for buyers remains to be seen.

Hybrid laser technology removes the lamp and makes the Pro9000 a very appealing home cinema projector

At its core, the Viewsonic Pro9000 is a promising concept - a home theater projector built around a hybrid light source. Its LED/laser engine boasts a lifespan of 20,000 hours, making lamp replacements a thing of the past. As one of the first LED/laser projectors to be specifically built for home theater, many people will find themselves salivating at the prospect of a maintenance-free projector. Gamers in particular will appreciate the projector's one-frame input lag and low-heat exhaust. However, there are some disadvantages to the Pro9000 as well. It lacks 3D capability, frame interpolation, good placement flexibility, high contrast, and comprehensive color adjustments. It is not as bright as most other home theater projectors. Other than the 20,000-hour light source and rapid one-frame input lag, the Pro9000 is more similar to 1080p projectors priced under $1500, but even against these lower-cost projectors its features and ease of use are somewhat limited. For LED/laser projectors to be attractive, they need to be price-competitive. The Viewsonic Pro9000 is a groundbreaking product, but it is also an early generation of a new technology. In the future, you can bet on most projectors using solid-state light engines, whether they be LED or hybrid or some other technology. Those future projectors will become more reasonably priced and more competitive as the technologies mature.