Projectors

No consumer-focused home cinema projector manufacturer has more experience with both native 4K resolution and laser lighting than Sony. I've known this for a while, but I still wasn't prepared for the performance prowess of its £12,000 VPL-VW790ES. This is a premium beamer that's capable of leaving your jaw on the floor.

There are four things you need to know about the BenQ TH535 right off the bat. First, it's a DLP projector that costs just £500. Second, while pitched as a home entertainment projector, it's also got a Presentation preset. Third, it's a Full HD model with no 4K or HDR capabilities. And, finally, it's really bright – a claimed 3,500 Lumens bright, to be precise.

Epson's latest 4K Pro-UHD LCD projector promises serious bang for your buck. For £1,500, the EH-TW7100 claims a maximum brightness of 3,000 nits and contrast ratio of 100,000:1, and image sizes up to 500in. It even packs a Bluetooth output for streaming audio to external speakers, in addition to its onboard 2 x 10W sound system.

Smart and compact, with a glossy white finish, this new 1080p DLP projector from Optoma is designed for living room rather than dark theatre use. So far, so typical, but what makes the HD29H particularly interesting is that while it's unequivocally a Full HD model, it's also HDR compatible. It'll read HDR10 metadata and attempt to produce a correctly balanced dynamic image.

BenQ has made some bold boasts about its new CinePrime series of projectors, and especially the flagship W5700 reviewed here. As with the lower-cost W2700 [see HCC #299], it incorporates CinematicColor technology, but here the company claims it reaches 100 per cent of the wide colour gamut used by UHD Blu-rays, making it the first single-chip DLP 4K home projector to achieve the feat.