Despite occasional colour wobbles, this is another quality laser projector from Epson
Projector | £4500 | whf.cm/LS12000B
Depending on how this review goes, the Epson EH-LS12000B arrives on our test benches at either a very apposite or a very unfortunate moment.
After all, it’s a 4K (kinda) laser projector aimed at serious home cinema fans that costs less than you might expect given its level of specification. Which makes it sound mighty similar to the seriously impressive but also surprisingly relatively affordable Sony VPL-XW5000ES. If the Epson can hold its own against that ground-breaking Sony, then, happy days. But if it can’t…
While the EH-LS12000B and XW5000ES laser projectors are probably each other’s biggest rivals right now, they are not in totally the same price ballpark. The Epson undercuts its new Sony rival by a tidy sum – around £1500, in fact. Those differences add up to a pretty big pile of 4K Blu-ray discs or a tidy external audio system before you have spent what the Sony costs.
Sony’s latest entry-level 4K laser projector, though, boasts arguably the finest image-processing system in the projector world and a genuine rather than ‘sort of’ 4K resolution. So the LS12000B’s job is to get close enough to the Sony’s performance to justify its price, while also out-gunning the new wave of less ambitious pseudo-4K laser projectors we are starting to see creeping in below £3000 or so.
It’s no lightweight
The EH-LS12000B is a well built, hefty and substantial bit of home entertainment kit. As we have come to expect from laser projectors with serious home cinema intent, its footprint is larger than most coffee tables would be comfortable with, pointing you towards the fact that a projector such as this should be permanently installed in a dedicated home cinema room rather than kept in a cupboard when not in use.
It wears its bulk quite tidily, though, thanks to an unusual textured black finish wrapped around a body that rounds-off pretty much any sharp edges.
A promisingly large lens sits front and centre; it is protected when the projector is switched off behind a pair of automatic sliding doors.
This projector is not natively 4K in the same way that Sony’s XW5000ES is. The three LCD imaging devices it uses to create its pictures don’t actually carry 3840 x 2160 pixels each, but rather are Full HD chips that use ‘advanced pixel shifting’ technology to create a 4K pixel density. This doesn’t mean the LS12000B definitely can’t deliver very sharp and detailed pictures that look higher in res
