BenQ W5000 home theatre projector: the big picture

Unless you only ever go to really small theatres, images of around 70 or so in (diagonal) don’t really give a true theatre experience. If you have the room for it, projection devices will give you a much bigger picture (up to 300 in diagonal) for around the same price as a large LCD or plasma panel.

One of the first things you will notice about the BenQ W5000 digital projector is that it is big and white. Weighing in at around 10kg and measuring nearly half-a-metre across, this is not the type of projector you pull out of your case to display PowerPoint slides. For best results it should be professionally installed, but even out of the box the images are very good.

Like most projectors, the W5000 can be either mounted on a shelf or on a wall using the supplied adjustable legs or mounting holes. One of the nice features of this unit is that it has a vertically adjustable lens which allows you to move the image up or down optically without losing resolution or having to resort to stacking phone books underneath the unit.

At the front of the projector is a large vent, an infrared remote sensor and a large 135mm lens hood with focus and zoom rings. While the lens itself is only 40mm in diameter, the lens hood looks impressive and allows for polymorphic lens adaptors. The zoom ratio is only 1.2x, which is fairly poor as it doesn’t give much scope for adjusting image size.

The side of the projector has silver-coloured panels with a vent on one side. The silver panel curves around the back where the power cord socket, a power switch and the various inputs are. There are two HDMI 1.2 sockets (which means the projector cannot take advantage of HDMI 1.3 enhancements such as Deep Colour), a composite input, component inputs and an S-Video input. While there is no VGA input, it is possible to input VGA signals through the 5 analogue BNC connectors with the appropriate adaptor cable (not supplied). There is also a 12V trigger terminal (to activate theatre automation devices to dim lights, lower the screen etc), an RS-232 port for a wired remote control, and a Kensington lock, although it’s unlikely that anyone will be smuggling this unit out under their raincoat.

Power-up from standby is around 35 seconds from turning the unit on to having an image displayed on the screen, with full brightness achieved a few seconds later. The default setting is cinema mode, which produces vivid images suitable for watching movies in dark rooms. Other presets include dynamic (enhanced brightness), standard (brighter than cinema) and three user-programmable settings. The unit gives you full control over brightness, tint, contrast, sharpness and gamma, so there is plenty of scope to adjust the images to your particular preferences. Digital keystone setting allows you to adjust the image if the projector is not completely aligned with the screen, although if the unit is professionally installed this should not be an issue.

Rated at 1,200 lumens, the images produced by the projector are certainly bright and vivid, even in rooms with some lighting, although for best image quality you want the room to be as dark as possible. The W5000 boasts a 10,000:1 contrast ratio, which meant that dark regions of movies still retained sufficient detail even when other parts of the scene were well lit. However, when viewing test patterns from DVE and HQV Silicon Optix test disks, the full range of grey gradients were not reproduced properly, with the 5% grey region tending to black and a 95% grey almost indiscernible from white. Image sharpness and resolution were excellent, with no noticeable pixel shift displaying 1080p test patterns. Image noise was also not noticeable, as even the finest patterns displayed correctly.

Since the unit is video only, there is no inbuilt speaker, which is no loss since you would be using a proper surround amp to deliver that theatre experience. Fan noise was not really an issue as we did not hear the unit over a typical movie soundtrack in our test lab. We found the remote to be a little large in the hand but it was functional. Unfortunately there is no backlighting, which makes the control hard to operate in a dark theatre room. Since most of the controls are duplicated on the top of the unit you don’t need the remote for setup.

Colour rendition was excellent with no noticeable tints or shading. If you prefer even more vivid colour, the unit provides a Brilliant Colour setting with enhanced colour saturation, although in our view the colours were a bit over-the-top, making programs look more like pre-schooler videos than natural colour.

The W5000 is a single DLP chip projector with a seven-segment colour wheel which allows the unit to deliver very subtle colour gradients. Since the wheel spins extremely fast, the dreaded rainbow effect that plagued earlier DLP projectors has virtually been eliminated. Being personally extremely sensitive to this effect, it was possible to notice slight rainbows when displaying high-contrast test patterns, and extremely bright moving white lines in the test patterns, but others were unable to see this. If you are extremely sensitive then DLP projectors might not be for you, but for most people DLP technology will give an outstanding image with a longer projector life than other technologies.

Overall we found this unit produced very good images at a reasonable price. If you have the room and suitable high definition video sources, the BenQ W5000 will delight. It’s just a pity you can’t get one in black.