Horrible-looking video with Dell Projector

Question

Hi guys,
Forgive me for posting anything regarding compatibility with a Dell projector - I had no choice. A customer had a room set up with a Dell DLP projector. The MBP recognized it just fine. However, the video output (using the VGA dongle) was just horrible. The video looked low brightness, and very high contrast. Subtle gradients were absolutely atrocious looking. The output when driving with a Dell Laptop looked much better.
Hooking up the VGA output to a Dell LCD monitor, and to a Sony CRT monitor looks just fabulous, however.
Do you guys have any idea why the video would look so horrible, and what I might be able to do to correct it, outside of buying my own projector?
Sincerely,
Rob
MBP 2Gig   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

You're going to get horrible colors with 99% of all the projectors out there, especially the way most conference rooms are setup.
Things I've noticed that really help with the de-facto business standard of Dell projectors.
1) Use a white background. (yes it really, ***** to make UGLY keynote presentations). But unless the room is pitch dark, black, and especially the gradient black look horrible.
2) Always design for 1024x768, 99% of all the projectors are still stuck at this resolution.
3) Keep stuff away from the edges of the screen, the Dell's destort the edges pretty bad, and often the setup in the conference room makes the image crooked on the wall/screen