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Chris Heinonen
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No matter what you’re watching today or plan to watch tomorrow, the JVC DLA-NX5 is the best projector for a dedicated home theater. It has the highest contrast ratio and best black level of all the sub-$10,000 projectors we tested, along with a true 4K resolution, HDR support, and a wider color gamut. Your 4K movies will have all the pop and depth you demand for a premium home theater experience.
The JVC DLA-NX5 produced the best overall image of all the projectors we tested.
The JVC DLA-NX5 was the best performer with both HD and 4K video due to its great contrast ratio, rich color, and excellent detail. The projector’s dynamic tone mapping of HDR signals is superb, so it does the best job preserving all the details in bright highlights. It supports almost all of the wider DCI/P3 color gamut that is currently used for 4K content, so you’ll see richer reds, blues, and greens. Its motorized lens system and built-in picture presets for specific screens make it easy to set up without a professional installer. The DLA-NX5 isn’t a great choice for living-room or other shared-space use (we have other recommendations for that), and it is larger than any other projector we tested (you won’t want to move it once it’s installed), but it does a great job in a home theater room.
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The Home Cinema 5050UB supports HDR and wide color gamut technologies, but it can’t match the detail or contrast of the best 4K projectors.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $2,700.
If you want a projector that looks great with 1080p content but can also display the improved color and HDR highlight details in 4K content, the Epson Home Cinema 5050UB does a great job for its price. This projector uses 1080p LCD panels with an optical shift to simulate a 4K resolution. It supports HDR10 playback and covers almost as much of the DCI color gamut as the JVC DLA-NX5, just without the full 4K resolution. It offers fully automated lens control and flexible setup options.
The Sony VPL-HW45ES is a 1080p projector that offers a bright image with lots of color and contrast.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $1,575.
If you can’t afford a good 4K projector or you don’t plan to upgrade to 4K sources anytime soon, we recommend the Sony VPL-HW45ES 1080p projector for home theater use. It offered a better black level and contrast ratio than any of the cheap ($1,500-and-under) 4K projectors we tested, and it has accurate color and ample light output, along with flexible setup plus low input lag for gaming.
The JVC DLA-NX5 produced the best overall image of all the projectors we tested.
The Home Cinema 5050UB supports HDR and wide color gamut technologies, but it can’t match the detail or contrast of the best 4K projectors.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $2,700.
The Sony VPL-HW45ES is a 1080p projector that offers a bright image with lots of color and contrast.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $1,575.
I’ve reviewed projectors for nearly a decade, and I’m an ISF Level II–certified calibrator. I have the test equipment to provide all the measurements necessary to objectively evaluate a projector’s performance, as well as a light-controlled environment in which to perform the testing. I’ve performed hands-on evaluation of dozens of projectors from $300 to $65,000 in price, and I’ve calibrated projectors professionally.
If you want to transform a spare room into your own personal cinema, you need a dedicated home theater projector. These projectors are specifically meant for a room that offers complete light control. One of the major improvements in these projectors over entry-level models is the ability to produce much darker blacks, giving you a better contrast ratio—the difference between the darkest and brightest parts of an image. Ambient light in your room (windows without curtains, for example) washes out the blacks. You can still use a home theater projector during the day, provided that you have blackout curtains or shades in the room, but if you can’t control the light, you lose most of the advantage that these projectors offer over cheaper models, and one of our less expensive recommendations is probably a better choice.
The BenQ HT2050A’s best-in-class contrast ratio, bright output, and impressive color accuracy make it our pick for the best cheap projector.
These projectors also work best paired with a good projector screen, preferably one with a positive gain (the amount of light reflected back to the viewer), rather than a flat-white or gray screen. If you use a wall, the projector’s image will be 50 to 70 percent dimmer than if you use a proper screen, and HDR won’t work well at all. Having some gain makes the image brighter—albeit at the expense of viewing angles—and lets you see more HDR highlights. All the projectors we reviewed produce enough light to work on screens up to about 130 inches diagonal, although HDR performance drops a bit on large screens.
A dedicated home theater projector is one specifically meant for a room that offers complete light control.
Similarly, you should consider a home theater projector only if you are able to mount it to your ceiling permanently. These models are simply too large to fit atop a stool or a coffee table in a living room, and they aren’t designed to be moved around. While entry-level projectors are about the size of a few stacked laptops or textbooks, a home theater projector is closer in size to a home theater receiver, so you should place it out of the way.
Projectors designed for a dedicated home theater room don’t have any speakers built in, so they need a separate sound system. They also have only a pair of HDMI inputs, so you probably need something else to switch between sources. Usually these projectors are paired with an AV receiver that handles both of those duties, but just keep in mind that you need something to handle sound and input switching for you. Also, these projectors have no TV tuners, so if you watch over-the-air broadcasts, you need to get an external tuner.
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Stylish design and great sound make the Polk Signature Series S15, S10, and S35 combo our pick for the best surround-sound system.
If you want the best AV presentation of your favorite films, we recommend 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs, and the Panasonic DP-UB420 is the best player we’ve tested.
The best projectors have excellent picture quality, but what does that mean? There are four elements to a great-looking image: contrast ratio, brightness, color accuracy, and color gamut.
Contrast ratio, or the difference between the darkest part of the image and the brightest, is the most important factor when it comes to picture quality. A projector (or a TV, for that matter) with a low contrast ratio will appear flat, washed out, and boring. Many new projectors support high dynamic range, a feature designed to show a greater range between the brightest and darkest parts of the image. To watch HDR video, you need both specially formatted content and a projector that can properly play that content.
Brightness, also called light output on a projector, is crucial. This determines how large of a screen you can have, what type of screen you can have (more on this in a moment), and, of course, how bright the image is. Home theater projectors don’t need to be as bright as a television, as they’re not normally used in bright rooms, but higher brightness is beneficial for HDR content.
Color accuracy refers to how well a projector can display the colors on screen to be true to the original content. If the director and cinematographer want a shirt to be a specific color when they shoot the movie, a projector with high color accuracy will ensure that you see that color on screen. It also ensures that your grayscale (from black to white) is a neutral gray and free of color tint.
Color gamut refers to how many colors a projector can display. Ultra HD content has a wider color gamut than standard HD content; right now, most UHD content is mastered with the same DCI/P3 color gamut used in theatrical cinema (the ultimate goal is the even larger Rec 2020 color gamut). This expanded color gamut allows a projector to display richer reds, blues, and greens than ever before. Many projectors can’t display all these shades yet, but some can.
All projectors use one of three technologies to create an image: LCD (liquid crystal display), LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon), or DLP (Digital Light Processing). DLP offers some advantages over LCD and LCoS—namely, better motion resolution, lower 3D crosstalk, and better overall image uniformity. However, LCD and LCoS projectors generally offer higher contrast ratios that make DLP projectors look washed out and flat when you view the images side by side. (Plus, some people are susceptible to the “rainbow effect” that’s common with inexpensive DLP projectors, when bright objects seem to have rainbow trails.) So, while many of our budget projector recommendations are DLP-based, LCD and LCoS projectors are usually the better choice for a high-end home theater.
Now that 4K content and playback devices are readily available—in the form of 4K Blu-ray players and streaming media devices—our priority has shifted toward home theater projectors that can accept and properly display 4K HDR signals, although we also considered some lower-priced 1080p models.
In addition to the picture-quality features we describe above, for evaluating 4K projectors, we first considered four basic questions:
We wanted any 4K projector we tested to support at least three of those features, although some were more important than others.
Strangely enough, whether a projector was “true” 4K turned out to be the least important feature for overall picture quality. Some projectors (such as the JVC DLA-NX5 and Sony VPL-VW295ES) display the full resolution natively with a 4K panel; others (such as the Epson 5050UB) use a process called optical shift, where they manipulate the output of a 1,920-pixel-wide chip with lenses to produce the image. Both methods produce more on-screen detail than you get from a 1080p projector, but they do it in different ways (and frankly, most “4K” content you can watch these days is already upscaled from a 2K digital master anyway).
More important to the overall 4K picture quality is the projector’s ability to accept and properly display a video’s high dynamic range information. HDR is harder to evaluate on a projector than on a TV. Because a projector’s brightness depends on many factors, including the size of your screen, the throw distance, the screen gain, and the age of the bulb, two people with the same projector can have images with very different peak brightness levels. With identical HDR TVs, the peak brightness is the same. Projectors have to do far more processing of HDR content because of this, so the quality of HDR can vary far more from projector to projector than the quality of an SDR signal might.
We also measured each projector to see how much of the DCI/P3 color gamut it could reproduce. With all the projectors we tested, showing the expanded color gamut caused a reduction in brightness, so even if the projector supports it, you might not want to enable the wider color gamut.
Finally, a projector needs to have HDMI 2.0b inputs in order to accept a 4K signal with HDR. HDMI 2.0b comes in a couple of flavors: 10.2 Gbps and 18.0 Gbps. Most HDR content displays okay at 10.2 Gbps, but some content doesn’t display at full resolution or at its optimal refresh rate unless you have an 18.0 Gbps connection. So to make sure we tested projectors that delivered the best quality for the money, we looked for 18.0 Gbps support.
I set up all the projectors in my home theater room using a 92-inch Stewart StudioTek 100 screen with a 1.0 gain. I measured all of them with CalMAN 2018 software, an i1Pro2 spectrometer, and a SpectraCal C6 HDR colorimeter using test patterns from a Murideo Six-G to find the most accurate picture mode and adjust it so that the HDR content was tone-mapped as accurately as possible. We fed the projectors HDR content from a Panasonic UB820 4K Blu-ray player and streaming content from a Roku Premiere or an Amazon Fire TV. We fed standard Blu-ray content from another Panasonic UB820 player, which allowed us to directly compare 4K and Blu-ray content on separate inputs from the projector. We also used a Monoprice HDMI splitter to feed identical signals to multiple projectors at once to compare them back-to-back by blocking the output from one and then switching.
The JVC DLA-NX5 produced the best overall image of all the projectors we tested.
The JVC DLA-NX5 is the best 4K projector you can get without spending the equivalent of what you’d pay for a small car. It had the highest contrast ratio (an astounding 21,494:1) and the brightest highlights of all the projectors we tested, along with almost full coverage of the wider DCI color gamut—so it produced the best HDR image. JVC has moved to true 4K D-ILA panels this year (as opposed to the optical shifting with 1080p panels that the company used in previous projectors), so the NX5 can show every pixel in your 4K movies and games. The automated lens makes it easy to set up, and the projector gives you an accurate image out of the box. In our tests, this projector came closest to replicating the viewing experience of our reference OLED TV on a projection screen, but it is the largest, heaviest projector we tested.
The JVC was the last projector that I tested for this update, but it only took a minute to realize how impressive the image was compared to the competition. JVC’s projectors use the company’s proprietary D-ILA technology, a version of liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS), to produce the darkest onscreen blacks of any projector we’ve tested. Although the DLA-NX5’s peak brightness might be similar to that of the other models we looked at, its ability to display darker blacks made the image look that much better in our tests. Bright highlights popped against black backgrounds; on other projectors, the same highlights looked dimmer against a dark gray background. I could see details in nighttime scenes that were not visible on other projectors. Letterbox bars that were a dark gray on the other projectors seemed to disappear into the darkness on the JVC.
Most important, the DLA-NX5’s better black level improves the quality of both HDR and SDR content. Even if you don’t watch a single 4K program on this JVC projector, it still produces better-looking images than the competition. Over the next few years, the amount of 4K content will grow and take the place of HD, just as HD did with standard definition, but the DLA-NX5 makes your HD content look as good as possible right now.
The NX5’s great black levels result from a combination of its D-ILA chips and the projector’s dynamic iris. The dynamic iris automatically reduces the amount of light that the JVC produces for dark scenes, making my usual torture test of the hilltop scene in the final Harry Potter film a breeze for it to display. Other projectors that we tested also include a dynamic iris, but the iris was either too slow to react, making the light output change in unnatural ways, or too noisy in use, so you can hear it adjusting while trying to watch a movie.
The DLA-NX5 handled HDR content better than most 4K projectors. It offers auto tone mapping that, when enabled, did a superb job of preserving highlight details as well as color saturation and overall brightness. Where other projectors made the sun in Pan look washed out, the JVC rendered an accurate mix of vibrant yellows and oranges. This projector also offers more HDR tone-mapping controls than the competition, which lets you tailor the tone mapping to your screen size and gain for the best overall image. The JVC manual even includes recommended settings based on content, giving you a good starting point.
The DLA-NX5 also showed richer, truer shades of red, green, and blue (and all the colors in between) than the other projectors we tested. It displays most of the DCI/P3 color gamut that is currently used for 4K content. It’s also ready for future content, as it can manage a sizable amount of the Rec.2020 color space: 76.6 percent, the second highest amount in our test. (The leader was at 78.2 percent, while some only covered 54 percent.) This means that the DLA-NX5 can show you more of the colors in 4K content. However, showing these colors will reduce the projector’s brightness. On my 92-inch screen this wasn’t a problem, but if you have a larger screen, you might want to sacrifice these additional colors for improved brightness.
The DLA-NX5 features a pair of HDMI 2.0 inputs that accept the full 18.0 Gbps bandwidth that the HDMI 2.0 spec is capable of. Many other projectors have only a single HDMI 2.0 input or don’t allow the full 18.0 Gbps bandwidth, making them incompatible with some HDR content today and more in the future. Although most people might use only a single HDMI input with a projector (letting their receiver do the input switching), having a pair of HDMI 2.0 inputs is better, especially if one goes bad.
The motorized lens makes setting up the JVC relatively easy. You can control focus, lens shift (+/- 34 percent horizontal and +/- 80 percent vertical), and zoom (2.0x) from the remote instead of having to reach for dials or buttons on the unit itself. You can also stand at the screen while you make your adjustments, so you can dial in the focus more easily without needing someone else to help you. The projector gives you the option to save multiple lens memories if you have a screen shape other than 16:9, such as a 2.40:1 CinemaScope screen, making it easy to fit multiple aspect ratios onto the screen without always redoing the lens settings.
Out of the box, the DLA-NX5’s image looks pretty accurate, and the projector contains options to adjust the output based on your screen. You can refer to a list of about 100 popular screen materials and input the corresponding number to automatically apply the adjustments. Because each screen has its own color properties, this feature allows you to get a more accurate image easily without needing to do a professional calibration. But you’ll still get the most accurate results by having a professional calibrate the projector. (We don’t usually recommend going that far for TVs, but calibration is more useful for projectors.)
If you do have your projector calibrated, the JVC DLA-NX5 offers the widest selection of calibration controls of any projector we tested. You can calibrate for HDR and SDR, with a lot of flexibility to make sure it works for your room and environment. Every projector we tested offers the basic calibration controls, but the JVC DLA-NX5 goes above and beyond in this regard.
While the DLA-NX5’s automatic tone mapping helped make HDR look better than the competition, HDR is still an issue with projectors. The JVC relies on the metadata in the HDR content to produce the most accurate image, but not all HDR content includes metadata. We got the best image from the JVC when we paired it with the Panasonic DP-UB820, the upgrade pick in our best 4K Blu-ray player guide. The Panasonic can apply a custom tone map to the HDR content (which will include metadata) before sending it to the JVC, making it easier for the JVC to correctly display the content. Every projector we tested benefitted from the Panasonic’s tone-mapping capabilities, but the JVC did the best job handling HDR content without it.
This projector is huge. Prior JVC models were already large, and the DLA-NX5 is absolutely massive, weighing 43 pounds. Most ceiling projector mounts will not be able to hold it. When I went shopping for a projector mount for my new theater room, I specifically looked for a model that could hold older JVC projectors, and it managed to work here, as well. If you already have a mount, some companies sell custom JVC brackets that attach to a normal threaded pipe, but be sure to check the weight and size limits of your existing mount.
The DLA-NX5’s handling of motion is best suited for movies and TV shows, while some other projectors offered a bit better performance with sports and video games. The JVC measured 45 ms of input lag in game mode, which should be fine for most gamers, but the D-ILA panels don’t respond as quickly as DLP does, so the image has a bit of motion blur to it. I’d still be completely happy playing video games on the JVC, but the Sony VPL-VW295ES has lower input lag and slightly less motion blur.
If you want to watch 3D through the DLA-NX5, you need to buy and attach the optional 3D transmitter; other projectors have the transmitter built in. You would also need to buy the 3D glasses.
The Home Cinema 5050UB supports HDR and wide color gamut technologies, but it can’t match the detail or contrast of the best 4K projectors.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $2,700.
If you want a projector that can take advantage of 4K HDR content but you don’t want to spend what it takes to get the best contrast ratio or a true 4K resolution, the Epson Home Cinema 5050UB is your best bet. This Epson model isn’t a true 4K projector: It uses 1080p panels with an optical shift to show extra resolution, so it isn’t quite as detailed with true 4K content as the JVC DLA-NX5. It also doesn’t display HDR content as well because of its lower contrast ratio of 4,400:1, but it can show extra detail in HDR highlights. Its color-gamut coverage is almost equal to that of the DLA-NX5, and it has fully automated lens control and flexible setup options.
The 5050UB looks very good with 1080p content, making it a good choice for most things you’ll watch today. It does support a wider color gamut, but enabling that function caused light output to drop from 236 nits to 105 nits in our testing, a difference that was noticeable. We preferred the look of HDR with brighter highlights without the expanded gamut coverage. By comparison, the JVC is brighter even with wide color gamut engaged. The 5050UB also offers a tone mapping control for HDR to help customize the amount of highlight detail and brightness to match your screen, but not to the same level as the JVC.
The Epson remote hasn’t changed in years. It’s backlit with quick access to most features. Photo: Rozette Rago
Epson added 18 Gbps HDMI 2.0 inputs this year to support 4K video at 60 Hz. Photo: Rozette Rago
The Epson remote hasn’t changed in years. It’s backlit with quick access to most features. Photo: Rozette Rago
Epson added 18 Gbps HDMI 2.0 inputs this year to support 4K video at 60 Hz. Photo: Rozette Rago
The 5050UB is easy to set up, with fully automated lens control (supporting screen aspect ratios other than 16:9 without letterboxing), 2.1x zoom, and generous lens shifting (+/- 96.3 percent vertical shift and +/- 47.1 percent horizontal).
One annoyance with the Epson 5050UB is that the projector doesn’t automatically detect the type of signal and change to the proper picture mode. I set up the projector to look its best in the Natural mode for SDR content and the Bright Cinema mode for HDR, but I had to remember to change it myself from one mode to the other.
The Sony VPL-HW45ES is a 1080p projector that offers a bright image with lots of color and contrast.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $1,575.
If you can’t afford a good 4K projector like one of our picks above, you should get a great 1080p projector like the Sony VPL-HW45ES instead of a poor 4K one. None of the cheap ($1,500-and-under) 4K projectors we tested looked as good as the VPL-HW45ES. Its darker blacks gave the image far more pop and depth than we saw from budget 4K projectors (and similarly priced 1080p models), and it offers accurate colors, plenty of light output, low input lag for gaming, and a flexible lens for easier placement and setup.
The VPL-HW45ES’s Reference picture mode produced a very accurate image in our tests. Colors were rich and pure, and skin tones looked real rather than sunburnt. The projector’s good contrast ratio (we measured 4,600:1) maintained deep blacks while retaining shadow details and bright whites. Using our projection screen pick and this projector’s low-lamp mode, you get an image with 65 nits of brightness, higher than the 48 to 55 nits that the SMPTE recommends. In its high-lamp mode, you get an exceptional 155 nits, a result as bright as that of many LCD TVs.
In our tests, with input-lag reduction enabled on the VPL-HW45ES, input lag fell from 106 ms to 22 ms. This is one of the lowest measurements we’ve seen, better than what we’ve gotten from any other projector we’ve tested (and beaten by only one TV). If you’re using the VPL-HW45ES for your gaming sessions and are still losing, you can rest easy knowing that the problem isn’t the projector.
The VPL-HW45ES offers more zoom (1.6x) and better lens shifting (+/- 71 percent vertical shift and +/- 25 percent horizontal shift) than most cheap 4K models or most cheap 1080p models. That flexibility lets you place this projector in a wide area relative to the center of the screen and still have the image line up correctly. This model lacks the automated lens control you get on our 4K picks; you have to manually adjust the zoom, focus, and lens shifting on the projector itself, rather than the remote control.
The VPL-HW45ES lacks a 12-volt trigger output, so if you have an automated drop-down screen, this projector can’t make it activate automatically. The VPL-HW45ES also lacks Ethernet, so if you own a home-control system that uses IP control (such as Control4 or Crestron), you’re out of luck; you need to add a really long IR relay cable to the VPL-HW45ES (or find another solution) to control it via a third-party control system.
JVC, Epson, and Sony have not introduced new high-performance home theater projectors to replace our current picks, even though they are several years old at this point. New home theater projectors are often announced at the annual CEDIA Expo trade show in September. Although this year’s show has been cancelled due to coronavirus concerns, we may still receive new projector announcements around that time.
Companies like Epson, Optoma, LG, and BenQ have introduced new 4K-compatible projectors over the past couple years, but they’ve been targeted at brighter viewing spaces—so they offer high light output but don’t deliver the deeper black levels and higher contrast of the home theater projectors we reviewed here. We are currently considering how to evaluate those projectors, which generally fall in price somewhere between this guide and our Best Budget Projector for a Home Theater guide.
The Sony VPL-VW295ES offers a full 4K resolution, a motorized lens, and very good SDR image quality. It doesn’t offer the dynamic iris or the wider color gamut support that the JVC DLA-NX5 offers, and you can’t fine tune the HDR presentation to the same degree. To get a dynamic iris (and thus a better contrast ratio) requires that you move up to the $10,000 VPL-VW695ES. The 295ES did have the lowest input lag of any 4K projector we tested for this update, 36 ms in game mode, and the motion quality is very good for sports and video games. But the JVC looks better overall with both SDR and HDR material.
The BenQ HT5550 uses a DLP chipset to display all the pixels in a 4K signal, and it offers wide color gamut support. It has a dynamic iris, but it was slow to react and very noisy in use. The image was very sharp, but black levels were not as good as what I saw from the LCD and LCoS projectors, so HDR lacked pop, and the tone mapping with HDR content often left highlights looking washed out. Plus, there’s no game mode, leading to 60 ms of input lag.
The BenQ HT3550 also has a DLP chipset, but you can’t adjust the lens position as much as you can with the HT5550, and the lens isn’t as sharp. HDR often looked washed out compared to the other projectors, and the colors were not as accurate. There’s no game mode, so lag times are around 60 ms.
The BenQ HT2550 uses a 1080p DLP chipset with an optical shift, but it lacks support for wide color gamut. We could barely make out test patterns with one-pixel stripes. It also looked worse with HDR content than with the SDR version of the content. Because this model doesn’t offer many benefits with 4K HDR content, we recommend getting the 1080p-only BenQ HT2050A or paying a little more for the Sony VPL-HW45ES instead.
The Epson Home Cinema 5040UB is our previous budget pick and is similar to the newer 5050UB, but it’s not as bright—so HDR won’t have the same level of pop. It also lacks the improved HDR tone mapping controls of the 5050UB. If the price difference between the two is high, this one is still worth considering.
The Epson Home Cinema 4000 is similar to the 5050UB but has a lower contrast ratio and is better for a room with ambient light. Because ambient light can hurt how HDR looks far more than it can affect SDR, we focused on projectors in a dedicated home theater room environment, where the 5050UB is clearly better and worth the extra price.
The Optoma UHD60 uses a different DLP chipset than the BenQ HT2550 and does a better job of resolving one-pixel details, but it has the same problems—no wide color gamut support and middling HDR performance. It produces a very big, bright, detailed image but can’t bring out the best in 4K content. If you’re concerned only about fine detail, this model is worth a look, but other projectors offer superior 1080p or 4K images at a similar price.
The Optoma UHZ65 uses a laser light source, but it lacks support for wide color gamut and doesn’t have a motorized lens. At $4,000, it isn’t a model we were interested in—but if you absolutely hate having to buy a replacement bulb after 5,000 hours, this is an option.
A number of recent 4K DLP projectors, such as the Optoma UHD50 and Vivitek HK2288-WH, also look to use the same reference DLP design as the BenQ HT2550. Considering the lack of an expanded color gamut and the presence of lower contrast ratios that can’t do HDR as well, we decided to not test these models after testing the BenQ.
The Panasonic PT-AE8000U offers 1080p resolution and lens memories, but the company introduced it in 2012 and has not updated it since. The updated models from Sony and Epson provide far better contrast ratios and image quality for the same price.
The JVC DLA-RS4500 is a true 4K projector that uses a laser phosphor light source with the company’s D-ILA panels, but its $35,000 list price kept us from considering it for this guide.
JVC also offers the more affordable 4K-enhanced projector, the LX-UH1B, but it uses a DLP chip instead of the company’s proprietary D-ILA chips. This projector looks to have more flexible lens shift for easier placement than other affordable DLP models, but it lacks wide color gamut support. In addition, the black levels cannot match those of Epson projectors at the same price that also offer 4K enhancement, wide color gamut, and flexible setup.
Chris Heinonen
Chris Heinonen is a senior staff writer reporting on TVs, projectors, and sometimes audio gear at Wirecutter. He has been covering AV since 2008 for a number of online publications and is an ISF-certified video calibrator. He used to write computer software and hopes to never do that again, and he also loves to run and test gear for running guides.
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