Aimed at anything from large meeting rooms to small auditoriums, the Christie LWU505 stands ready to show bright, high quality images. Built around an LCD engine and rated at 5000 lumens, the projector's 1920x1200 widescreen resolution can handle complex data images like engineering drawings or show multiple windows with less complex data in each. It can also show 1080p video without having to scale the image to a lower resolution. More important, it delivers on image quality for both data and video.

The projector offers a number of features for easy setup, most notably four corner keystone correction with a separate setting for each corner, which makes it easy to get a truly rectangular image. The combination of brightness, high resolution, image quality, and setup convenience makes the Christie LWU505 impressive indeed. And although it isn't cheap, it's reasonably priced for what it delivers, at $8995 list, with government and education discounts available.

Resolution suitable for fine detail or multiple windows. The Christie LWU505's 1920x1200 resolution does a superb job of showing fine detail in complex data images or showing more mundane material in multiple windows with a useful amount of, say, a spreadsheet or text in each. Divide the screen into four 960x600 windows, and each one will offer a higher resolution than SVGA's 800x600.

For video, the 1920x1200 resolution can show a full 1080p image without scaling. You can also show images from two sources at once, easily switching between Picture-by-Picture mode, with two equal size images next to each other, and Picture-in-Picture mode, with one source full screen and a corner cut out to insert the second image at your choice of 10 to 50 percent height and width.

Bright image. Although the projector didn't quite match its 5000 lumen rating on our tests, we measured it in its brightest mode and largest image size (wide angle setting for the lens) at 4280 lumens, or 86% of its rating, a higher percentage than many projectors deliver. More important, it's easily bright enough for the 92" diagonal 1900x1200 image we used to stand up to the typical ambient light in an office or classroom, and also bright enough to throw larger images for larger venues. The same holds true even for the somewhat lower levels we measured for the projector's two other presets, at 3585 and 3846 lumens.

Eco mode drops the brightness by about 22%, to 3319 lumens for the brightest preset. That seems a more than fair trade for increasing the rated lamp life by 50%, from 2000 to 3000 hours.

For low light conditions or smaller screen sizes, where the image might be too bright to view comfortably, you can use some combination of Eco mode and one of the less bright presets. You can also place the projector closer to the screen, and adjust the zoom lens to give you a smaller image size. With the lens set for maximum telephoto (minimum image size), the brightness drops by about 23%, to 3286 lumens.

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