Our Ricoh WXC4660 Professional Projector Review

Briefly about the main

The Ricoh WXC4660 is an ultra short throw pro­jec­tor designed for edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions, muse­ums, busi­ness­es, art instal­la­tions and oth­er per­for­mances. Its main fea­tures: the abil­i­ty to pro­duce a large pic­ture even in a small room, noise­less­ness, a bright pic­ture. The work­ing res­o­lu­tion is 1280×800 pix­els, which is more than enough for its pur­pos­es.

Specifications Ricoh WXC4660

• Ultra short throw optics: 130″ image at 75cm;
• Bright Philips HLD LED back­light;
• Light source resource 20,000 hours;
• Pro­jec­tion tech­nol­o­gy 3 LCD;
• Res­o­lu­tion 1280×800 pix­els;
• Inter­faces:
  • Mini D‑SUB15pin × 1 (com­put­er input),
  • Mini D‑SUB15pin × 1 (mon­i­tor out­put),
  • HDMI × 1
  • HDMI(MHL) × 1
  • 3.5mm audio jack × 1,
  • RCA(R/L) × 1,
  • Video × 1,
  • USB type A × 1,
  • USB‑B mini × 1,
  • Net­work con­trol × 1;
• Speak­ers 10W×2.

box and what’s inside

The Ricoh WXC4660 pro­jec­tor is pack­aged in a reg­u­lar brown recy­cled card­board box. Not for the sake of econ­o­my: the com­pa­ny is head­quar­tered in Japan, where they respect the envi­ron­ment and recy­cle mate­ri­als.

The pro­jec­tor itself is placed in two soft inserts in order to eas­i­ly sur­vive the long jour­ney from the man­u­fac­tur­er to the buy­er. Also inside are the pow­er cable, VGA cable, instruc­tions, remote con­trol and a pair of AAA bat­ter­ies. There is also a CD with all the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion.

What does it look like

The design of the pro­jec­tor can be summed up in two words: prac­ti­cal and large. The mat­te white body is stain resis­tant and high­ly util­i­tar­i­an. In addi­tion to struc­tur­al ele­ments and con­trols, there is noth­ing for the eye to catch on.

The size is real­ly out­stand­ing and very dif­fer­ent from the “home” mod­els — 45x42x15 cm. This is due to the fact that the bright back­light tech­nol­o­gy requires large cool­ing radi­a­tors. Yes, and the lens sys­tem requires a lot of space in the body of the device.

The pro­jec­tor can be installed on any hor­i­zon­tal sur­face or mount­ed with a stan­dard wall or ceil­ing brack­et.

The lens win­dow is locat­ed on top — this is a nor­mal prac­tice for ultra-short throw mod­els. But the IR receiv­er for the remote con­trol demon­strates an orig­i­nal design approach: its win­dow goes simul­ta­ne­ous­ly to the top and front pan­els. This is done so that, with any method of installing the pro­jec­tor, the sig­nal from the remote con­trol pass­es with­out long “aim­ing”.

Also next to the sig­nal receiv­er there are three indi­ca­tors: pow­er, oper­at­ing mode, air fil­ter sta­tus. It must be remem­bered that the Ricoh WXC4660 pro­duces a lot of heat in oper­a­tion, and the con­di­tion of the cool­ing sys­tem must be mon­i­tored. If the light comes on, the fil­ter needs to be changed or cleaned. Access to it is locat­ed on the left, as well as, accord­ing­ly, the air intake — this should be tak­en into account when installing the pro­jec­tor, with­out mov­ing it close to the wall or oth­er objects that impair heat trans­fer. The pro­jec­tor is equipped with a very pow­er­ful fan to blow out the accu­mu­lat­ed heat. How­ev­er, its oper­a­tion can only be heard when the pro­jec­tor is at max­i­mum bright­ness, and in the stan­dard eco mode it is very qui­et.

All con­nec­tors are placed on the rear end, there are quite a lot of them — the design­ers took into account that uni­ver­si­ties, as a rule, have an extreme­ly diverse fleet of elec­tron­ic equip­ment and it is bet­ter to give out con­nec­tors with a mar­gin. There­fore, on board the Ricoh WXC4660 pro­jec­tor are: two HDMI 1.4 (one with MHL sup­port), two VGA inputs and one out­put, USB with the abil­i­ty to trans­fer video infor­ma­tion, USB for PC com­mu­ni­ca­tion, net­work RJ45, RSR232 for remote con­trol, com­pos­ite video input, RCA- audio input and 3.5mm audio input and out­put.

There is also anoth­er IR receiv­er win­dow at the back, which great­ly sim­pli­fies pro­jec­tor con­trol.

On the right side of the Ricoh WXC4660 there are ven­ti­la­tion grilles through which the pro­jec­tor emits hot air — again, you should take care that noth­ing inter­feres with the air flow dur­ing oper­a­tion. Also on the right side are speak­ers and nine con­trol but­tons. The but­tons dupli­cate the func­tion­al­i­ty of the remote and are use­ful if the oper­a­tor is sit­ting next to the pro­jec­tor dur­ing a lec­ture.

Also, speak­ing of pro­jec­tor con­trol, you need to return to the top pan­el, where image adjust­ment tools are hid­den under spe­cial cov­ers. These are zoom, lens shift and focus. Zoom and focus are con­trolled using spe­cial wheel con­trols, but to shift the lens you need an end screw­driv­er. This com­plex­i­ty is due to the fact that these types of pro­jec­tors are installed once, the lens shift is adjust­ed on the day of instal­la­tion, after which the lens must remain firm­ly fixed in the select­ed posi­tion.

What is the secret of lighting

One of the main strengths of the Ricoh WXC4660 pro­jec­tor is the very bright HLD (High Lumen Den­si­ty) LED back­light. And it is real­ly notice­able, as they say, with the naked eye. The pro­jec­tor’s bright­ness is 4,000 lumens, four times that of a con­ven­tion­al LED back­light. This is a Philips devel­op­ment, and rel­a­tive­ly recent: straight from 2015. This tech­nol­o­gy is ful­ly called Col­orSpark HLD LED and its secret is that the red and blue LEDs shine sep­a­rate­ly, and the green light is cre­at­ed by illu­mi­nat­ing the blue LEDs with a green phos­phor rod.

This solu­tion has an addi­tion­al bonus: hav­ing three light sources at once, cov­er­ing the entire base col­or spec­trum, the design­ers were able to aban­don the col­or wheel.

The “bonus” of the tech­nol­o­gy was the high bright­ness of the image: if the pro­jec­tor used ordi­nary green LEDs, the bright­ness would be low­er, since they still have a small lumi­nous flux. In this sense, Philips tech­nol­o­gy has suc­ceed­ed in trick­ing physics into a tru­ly vibrant green.

Anoth­er ben­e­fit of Philips HLD LED tech­nol­o­gy is its life­time of a fan­tas­tic 20,000 hours. That’s ten times longer than the mer­cury lamps in cheap­er pro­jec­tors, so get­ting the Ricoh WXC4660 can real­ly be seen as an invest­ment.

Lenses, their features and benefits

The Ricoh WXC4660 pro­jec­tor belongs to the ultra short throw pro­jec­tor, which means, in par­tic­u­lar, that it has almost no zoom as such. The avail­able zoom range is 1–1.05x — it is need­ed for adjust­ing the image, not scal­ing. But they love this type of pro­jec­tor not for the zoom, but for the abil­i­ty to deploy a large bright pic­ture of more than 3 meters diag­o­nal at a dis­tance of less than a meter from the pro­jec­tor itself. Which is log­i­cal­ly able to max­i­mize the range of pos­si­ble instal­la­tion sites for the pro­jec­tor: a huge lec­ture hall, an exhi­bi­tion hall or a small room for prac­ti­cal exer­cis­es. The min­i­mum image diag­o­nal is 70 inch­es (177 cm) — a screen of this size will fit even in the most mod­est room.

As not­ed in the spec­i­fi­ca­tions, the pic­ture res­o­lu­tion is a mod­est 1280 × 800 pix­els. Mod­est for enter­tain­ment pur­pos­es — but more than suf­fi­cient for edu­ca­tion­al and pre­sen­ta­tion pur­pos­es. Also, at this res­o­lu­tion, opti­cal dis­tor­tions are not vis­i­ble, the pic­ture is beau­ti­ful with­out chro­mat­ic aber­ra­tions.

How much noise?

The fan noise gen­er­at­ed by the pro­jec­tor is direct­ly affect­ed by the select­ed bright­ness mode. The nom­i­nal val­ue of noise in eco mode is 33.5 dB, which is qui­eter than a human whis­per. The stan­dard mode is 37.5 dB, which is also very qui­et — there will be no need to raise your voice. In a large audi­to­ri­um where high bright­ness is need­ed, the pro­jec­tor will be rel­a­tive­ly loud, but… no one will hear it. After all, the sound in large rooms quick­ly fades, with­out dis­tract­ing peo­ple from the lec­ture.

What is hidden in the “Menu”

As befits pro­fes­sion­al equip­ment, the Ricoh WXC4660 menu is full of var­i­ous set­tings. There is even such a sub­tle speci­fici­ty as a mode for view­ing mono­chrome med­ical images, such as MRI or X‑ray. If you enable this mode, the pro­jec­tor will min­i­mize glare and dis­play the widest pos­si­ble range of shades of gray (yes, more than fifty). You can also adjust the col­or ren­der­ing or choose an alter­na­tive col­or scheme — but you need to do this with cau­tion, since the stan­dard mode is already quite good in itself.

One of the most use­ful soft­ware fea­tures of the Ricoh WXC4660 is the choice of image col­or tem­per­a­ture. This is extreme­ly use­ful when you want to project an image onto non-white sur­faces, such as a plain paint­ed wall.

Remote Control

Unlike the pro­jec­tor itself, the Ricoh WXC4660 remote con­trol turned out to be com­pact and con­cise, although there are quite a lot of but­tons on it. It does not have a back­light, which is not very con­ve­nient if the pre­sen­ta­tion takes place in com­plete dark­ness. The main but­tons are still easy to remem­ber and press by touch, but any sub­tle specifics will def­i­nite­ly require you to high­light your phone. On the oth­er hand, the need to change the pro­jec­tor set­tings dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion is rare, so you should­n’t wor­ry too much about it.

Final impressions

The Ricoh WXC4660 pro­jec­tor pro­duces an incred­i­bly bright pic­ture with­out dis­tor­tion and with accu­rate col­or repro­duc­tion in any room on any sol­id col­or sur­face. Large busi­ness­es and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions should appre­ci­ate such ver­sa­til­i­ty, as well as a large num­ber of con­nec­tors for con­nec­tion, as well as gen­er­al unde­mand­ing to the size of the room. If we add to this the very long ser­vice life of the Ricoh WXC4660, we get a ver­sa­tile and reli­able device that can work in any con­di­tions and (most impor­tant­ly!) Do its job well.