It’s an exciting time for projectors at the moment. Projectors have always been a very expensive option for what you actually received in terms of picture quality. They’ve not been the best choice for home entertainment simply because LCD and the newer LED televisions have been the better option. But now that the Epson TW9300, the TW9300W and finally TW7300 have appeared on the market, offering 4K projection to the consumer, although still an expensive option, we may see them start to overtake the larger sized televisions in some cases.
The Epson TW9300 is bulky, and will need quite a bit of space around it to be able to get the most out of the quality of the projection. It kicks out a lot of heat when under load. When we tested it, we held a movie night and watched four feature length Hollywood films in total. By the end of the night the projector was hot, and actually heated my flat. Thanks Epson, no need to pay for the radiators to be on. We placed it on a makeshift stand, as we’re only in a small flat, and was able to get a wall to wall projection out of it which was great. The distance from projector to the wall we used for the projection is around 4 metres and we were able to gain a projection of around 3.1m x 1.6m. Huge cinema style screen in the lounge. What more do you want?
We used the HDMI input to send a signal from a laptop to the projector, while sound relied on the optical input going into a soundbar. There is no HDMI passthrough or ARC which was a little disappointing to see, seeing as this piece of kit is quite expensive. However not unexpected as people who are looking for this kind of setup, probably has some kind of surround sound centre in their room anyway which will most definitely use optical connections.
Setup I will mention as these machines probably do look a bit intimidating, but it’s assured, it was an absolute breeze to set up. First I plugged it in, powering the machine. From here you’ll run through the initial setup. The most important parts were the positioning of the projector itself to get the picture in a good position on your wall, and secondly was the focusing. The lens is fully automatic so it was a case of adjusting a slider on screen to get the lines into focus enough. We also adjusted the front legs too so we could get the right height projection for the wall we were using it on.
The movies we played were The Dark Knight, Disney’s Mulan and Knocked Up. Okay, not the best movies of choice but still, we wanted to see what different types of genres looked like. Now to mention, we used Full HD downloaded copies of the movies, although the TW9300W is wireless which will stream content from your mobile, tablet or computer. Surprisingly, the picture quality was absolutely amazing. Okay, it will never compare to the sharpness of having a high quality LED screen in front of you, thanks to their backlights, but the colour reproduction of the Epson Two9300 was pretty much on point thanks to its 1,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio.
There’s a 2,500 lumen colour light output as well as a 2,500 white light output giving pretty accurate colours. The Dark Knight is a, as it says in the title, a very dark movie. The Bat Mobile chase scene, especially with the mix of black shadows and orange fire from explosions looked frightfully sharp. Disney’s Mulan, which is made up of very solid colours in general, unfortunately looked a little faint, which was a bit of a shame. Of course the room was as close to pitch black as possible, with it being night, curtains shut and all lights off. Knocked Up, the Seth Rogen rom-com again looked good and has some great colour reproduction.
Even though bulky, and really needs some kind of dedicated cinema room to use, the Epson Tw9300 and its 4K ability is one of the best projectors I’ve seen for a while. It’s not recommended that you’d use a product like this for a traditional living room setup. Although we’ve not had much hands on experience with projectors on TechNuovo, what we have seen at conventions and showrooms are all applied here. Epson, although known for their printers are coming in strong with projectors at the moment. If you’re looking to invest in a cinema setup, do not disregard this by any means.
