Review: BenQ W1050

No matter who you are, it will amaze me if you have never felt the need for a big picture. Whether it’s to get the feeling of cinema at home in the living room when the evening film is to be spun, or if you are simply to invite the group of friends to a football night, a TV can quickly become tingling. Or very expensive. The answer may be a projector like the BenQ W1050.

With the W1050, BenQ wants to offer the dream of a real cinema picture at home, at a give-away price that I actually think we have never tested in Sound & Vision before. You should be quite stingy to say that 6,500 kroner is expensive for a picture of 100 inches!

This is a standard HD projector, which does not support 4K Ultra HD content. That is not the point either. Here it is a matter of blowing up ordinary image sources for a large screen. Neither more nor less.

The layout of the  BenQ W1050

There is no optical lens adjustment here, which means that the projector must be placed directly against the screen so that the image is not skewed. As for the canvas, I would shop cheap in the online store.

Then it’s really just spinning movies. We tried to adjust the image slightly with a test disk, but there is not enough dynamics in the image to respond well to adjustment of black level and brightness. Each time we adjusted, we ended up returning to the original settings, and the picture got better.

The Cinema color mode looks most correct, but in a very bright living room in daylight, Vivid TV Mode works as an emergency solution. Sport Mode clings to extra green turf at the football match.

The image quality

The picture quality is actually surprisingly good. The black level is admittedly dark gray, but there is such a good touch in white that the contrast is experienced quite well anyway. The exception is in dark scenes, where it gets a little flat and blast. But this also applies to several projectors for 1,000 bucks, so this is no crisis at all.

I buy what I see on the screen, the images are natural and sharp enough to give empathy, and although the W1050 is parked by the high-end projectors I for fun compared to, namely the JVC DLA-X7900 and Sony VPL-VW360ES, so took the W1050 last place with crushing calm. The colors look right, the pictures are sharp enough, this is a great experience for the money. With one caveat: If you are among those who experience annoying RGB flicker (also called rainbow effect ) of DLP projectors because each of the three colors actually appear at different times, then it will be extra visible on this one.

Conclusion

The BenQ W1050 is a cheap HD projector that does what it is supposed to. The picture quality is actually quite good, on the verge of impressive when you look at the price tag. Film is rendered with natural colors. The black level is a bit blast, but the perceived contrast is decent enough – except in the darkest scenes.

If it were not for the fact that BenQ offers the much better W2000 at a not very much higher price, then the W1050 would get my warmest recommendation. I still think the W2000 is a better buy.