Projectors

The name of this wallet-friendly surprise is the 'LightStyle' LS-1, and it can be yours for just £4,000. A price which becomes even more eye-catching as you start to appreciate just how much the projector has in common with much more expensive models higher up the LS range.

For instance, it’s aesthetically identical to its ‘LightStyle’ siblings, sporting the same unusual vaguely circular design, and the same imposingly large footprint.

The LS-1’s size is significant because it suggests a markedly better build quality and internal design than you usually get with projectors at the sub-£5k price level.

Hidden away beneath a detachable cover on the LS-1’s rear is a respectable set of connections, including two HDMIs, a component video port, a D-Sub PC port, and 12V trigger/RS-232 jacks designed to aid the professional installer who will almost certainly set your LS-1 up for you given Runco’s ‘custom install’ distribution channels via its UK dealer Pulse Marketing.

It’s actually pretty handy that setting the LS-1 up won’t likely be your responsibility, for it’s one of the least user-friendly projectors I’ve seen. Its onscreen menus are boring to look at and so cluttered with tweaks that they’d likely have most ‘normal’ users running for the technophobe hills.

When it comes to adjusting the projector’s vertical image shifting, meanwhile, you have to use an allen key rather than a simple wheel or knob adjustment. To be fair, though, this unfriendly approach does allow the LS-1 to provide more image shifting precision.

Actually, there’s an upside to the cluttered menus too. For the sort of options and tweaks they’re cluttered with are comprehensive enough regarding issues like colour management and gamma controls to bag the official endorsement of boffins at the independent Imaging Science Foundation. This essentially means the LS-1 is deemed to have every key tweak a professional calibrator needs to optimise its performance to suit each owners’ individual room conditions.

Feature-packed
Considering it’s comfortably the cheapest projector in Runco’s LS range, it’s pleasing to find the LS-1 still clinging on to some of the key features sported by its more expensive siblings. You still get Runco’s acclaimed ViVix video processing system, for instance, along with a proprietary ConstantContrast dynamic iris system and Runco’s SuperOnyx technology for boosting the contrast delivered from its single-chip DLP engine.

Its 230W lamp is reasonably powerful too - though Runco’s high-end desire to always make sure its projectors produce images with plenty of punch and dynamism means the brand only recommends that the LS-1 be used with screens in the 63in-85in size range. Mind you, I tested it on a 90in screen (don’t tell Runco!) and didn’t feel shortchanged on brightness in the slightest...

In fact, I didn’t feel shortchanged by the LS-1 in any department. For it delivers more of Runco’s traditional picture authority than I could ever realistically have hoped for.

The brightness noted earlier really is striking for the LS-1’s price level, for instance. It ensures that images are propelled off even my neutral IMAGE screen with exemplary pop and punch. Even better, this potency at the bright end of the light spectrum is impressively counterpointed by deep, natural black tones.

As I would expect, given the LS-1’s expansive contrast range, Runco’s entry-level projector is also a tasty colour performer. It delivers a range of colours that’s wider than I’d normally expect to see for £4,000, and even better, it’s got the processing power to deliver the most subtle of colour nuances with startling finesse. Colour striping or blotching are things you don’t have to worry about on the LS-1, even when watching notoriously tricky sequences like the Mines of Moria segment of The Lord of the Rings.

The LS-1’s images are also exceptionally detailed and sharp when showing HD, yet there’s no sense that this sharpness is in any way forced or ‘created’ by sharpness processing. Runco’s projector just happens to be extremely good at letting through and reproducing every last pixel of detail from whatever HD source it’s fed.

Couple this image purity with the colour finesse noted earlier and you’ve immediately got a picture that exudes the sort of stability, solidity and accuracy usually only found on projectors costing substantially more.

This sense is underlined, moreover, by the way the LS-1 handles motion. So fluid and sharp does movement across the frame look that it’s hard to believe the LS-1 is a £4k single-chip DLP model. It’s important to stress, too, that moving skin tones don’t suffer with any of the fizzing noise that can still appear from time to time on many single-chip DLP PJs.