AUDIO-VISUAL
U
ltra-HD (or 4K in its domestic
context) has become well-embedded
in the television market over the last
couple of years. In home projection,
however, it hasn’t been so easy to achieve, or at
least not at the prices to which we have enjoyed
seeing home theatre projectors reach over the
previous decade. Where once a good movie
projector was priced in the tens of thousands,
prices toppled first to around $5000, then, from
companies like BenQ, to half that. But until
recently, 4K projectors have sat back up at the
tens of thousands, while attempts have been
made to deliver 4K at lower prices by using lower
resolution panels and pixel-shifting them, doing a
double hit or even four hits to create each frame.
Until very recently, the results have been
imperfect, but with BenQ’s third generation
of projector, including this W2700, we seem at
last to have true 4K, without the problems. The
results on the screen can be glorious.EQUIPMENT
This is a DLP projector, a technology created
by Texas Instruments, and it is somewhat
mindblowing in its operation, using a ‘chip’-like
device which is (in this case, pictured right) just
1.2cm wide, yet contains more than two milliontiny mirrors. These mirrors can be individually
pivoted in several directions, thereby delivering
pixels to your screen via the projector’s optical
system. In this projector the device has a native
resolution of 1920 × 1080, and it can shift them
to four separate positions during each frame of the
movie, thereby creating the Ultra-HD resolution
of 2840 × 2160. In this the new model is a
successor to the company’s previous W1700, but
the W2700 is a substantial redesign, and improves
on its performance, fixing the few niggles we had
in our review of that projector.
But it is also a physical successor to BenQ’s
earlier full-HD projectors, the W1070 andW1070+ (and others). These were successful
models from six years ago in the case of the
W1070, and BenQ reasons that those still using
them might be ripe for an upgrade to 4K. So the
W2700 has been designed to let them keep their
mounts and their screens, and simply swap in
the new 4K W2700 model with the minimum of
fuss, and no fiendish new screen size and throw
distance calculations required.
The enclosure is cream with grey front and
back panels. A cluster of controls are on the top
(or the bottom if you ceiling-mount it), along
with a sliding panel that reveals the zoom, focus
and vertical lens shift adjustments.4K AV PROJECTOR
BENQ W2700
The latest gen from BenQ delivers
UHD 4K resolution via four-flash DLP,
with colour delivery also a highlight.
All done with mirrors: the DLP chip (left) houses millions of tiny mirrors (centre) which can be pivoted
into four different positions to send pixels to different areas of the screen. Images: Texas Instruments.