Projector recommendations around £500

Whoop

Whoop

Whoop

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Joined
27 Nov 2003
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Location
Loughborough
Hi everyone,

I've tried this search before and it seems every time I read a projector guide online it is already out of date and none of the links work. I'm not after the best, secondhand is fine too but I just want full HD with a decent brightness to replace my cheapie 720p projector.

Does anyone have any experience with a mid price point model?
(I've seen the Yaber/WiMius/Vamvo stuff and I'm not convinced...)

It's for general movies and possibly putting the Switch/PC on there to entertain the kids.

Thanks for any advice. :-)
 
£500 is pretty-much bottom book money for a home-entertainment projector. The Chinese brands you've been looking at are nothing like the quality of an Optoma HD143 (£470), Optoma GT1080 (£530) or Benq TH585 (£550).
 
lucid said:
£500 is pretty-much bottom book money for a home-entertainment projector. The Chinese brands you've been looking at are nothing like the quality of an Optoma HD143 (£470), Optoma GT1080 (£530) or Benq TH585 (£550).
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Thank you, it was one of those brands I was actually leaning towards but there are so many variants and I'm guessing with a projector it would make more sense to buy new with replacement lamps being about £100
 
Whoop said:
Thank you, it was one of those brands I was actually leaning towards but there are so many variants and I'm guessing with a projector it would make more sense to buy new with replacement lamps being about £100
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Replacement lamps on these budget models are cheap now. £100-£150 is typical. Go back a decade and you'd be buying a similar performance projector for £800-£1000 with a replacement lamp cost of £200-£300.

At £500-ish, you're at a crossover point between cheap office projectors and the entry-level home entertainment stuff. Manufacturers such as Optoma offer a big range, and they save money by using the same chassis and some common parts across several models. There's something like another 14 different model variants that all look outwardly similar to the HD28e / HD143X. Dealers and online sellers who don't know or don't care about picture performance will try to persuade buyers that the cheaper business projectors are also good for home entertainment. They're not.

When plugging in a laptop and presenting in a bright meeting room then stuff such as good video scaling, decent motion processing, uniformity, colour accuracy, black level, power consumption and even fan noise all play second fiddle to brightness and portability. These business projectors might be 1920x1080 pixels and have a HDMI input or two, but that's about as far as they go for home entertainment, and that's not enough.

Picking apart the differences between the HD143X and the HD28e and the TH585 is a trickier business. They're all designed for the same purpose, and there's only a limited range of permutations of hardware. The stand-out points for me are that the HD28e has lower fan noise and better contrast than the other two. It's also the one with 10-bit video processing rather than 8-bit on the HD143X (I haven't checked the TH585 for this). Both the HD28e and the TH585 have very low lag (16ms) which bodes well for gaming.

Bear in mind that all of this is relative to similarly-priced projectors. Go up a few rungs and you'll start to see why there were 1080p projectors at £1500, £3,500, £7K, £10K and even £35K.
 
Whoop said:
Hi everyone,

I've tried this search before and it seems every time I read a projector guide online it is already out of date and none of the links work. I'm not after the best, secondhand is fine too but I just want full HD with a decent brightness to replace my cheapie 720p projector.

Does anyone have any experience with a mid price point model?
(I've seen the Yaber/WiMius/Vamvo stuff and I'm not convinced...)

It's for general movies and possibly putting the Switch/PC on there to entertain the kids.

Thanks for any advice. :)
Click to expand...



Go second hand.

If you are not in a black out cinema room, any Epson model around £500 in their home cinema line, preferably with a 9 at the start; so part of their 9xxx series.
If you are in a black out room, JVC X30.

I would not bother with the budget PJs like Optoma. The optoma and BenQ do not stand a chance in contrast and cinematic quality to a JVC (or Sony) and get defeated by Epson too IMO.
 
Last edited:
Thanks all, I'll consider the secondhand market too but I'll dodge Ebay etc I think!

I quite liked the look of both the Optoma HD28e and the Benq TH585 (the Benq was my first choice) so I'll dig a little bit more and then commit.

I could spend forever looking at options :-D

Oh, for times when I want to use it in the living room and we don't have a good flat wall... what's the best portable stand option? Pull-up from experience seems better quality than pull-down and I'm not allowed to mount anything :o
 
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