Boldly goes where no projector this price has gone before
Home cinema projector | £2999 | whf.cm/W4000i
The BenQ W4000i is the most home theatre-focused model from a new three-strong projector range by the Taiwanese brand that also includes the more living-room focused W2710i and the more home entertainment- (rather than home cinema-) based TK860i.
The W4000i is designed for use in a heavily darkened if not fully blacked out room, and while it’s easy enough to set up if you want to store it in a cupboard when not in use, we would recommend leaving it permanently installed in a dedicated movie/gaming room if at all possible.
The main home cinema selling points of its DLP projection engine are its 4K resolution, extreme 3200 lumens of light output from a long-life, four-LED lighting system, advanced light controls, and – most eye-catchingly of all – claimed coverage of the full 100 per cent of the DCI-P3 digital colour spectrum used in the commercial movie theatre world.
Neat styling
The W4000i treads the style line between ‘serious home cinema’ and ‘living room friendly’ very nicely. Its matt-black finish helps it disappear into the sort of blacked out room it’s designed for, while the lens recessed into its front-left side is large enough to raise hopes of more precise, geometrically correct and refined images than you might expect to get with cheaper home entertainment projectors.
Wrapping the design up is an attractive gloss-white remote control that boasts backlit buttons and a nice, spacious button layout.
As we would expect, the W4000i claims to be a 4K model. As with all home theatre DLP projectors, that doesn’t mean it actually carries 3840 x 2160 tiny digital mirror devices on its controller chip. Instead it ‘flashes’ a lower mirror count multiple times per frame of a 4K source to create what appears to your eyes to be a 4K image.
The W4000i supports high dynamic range (HDR) sources in the HDR10, HLG and, surprisingly for a projector, HDR10+ formats.
Most HDR sources are also mastered with wide colour gamuts, so it’s exciting to find the W4000i joining the ranks of projectors equipped with a wide colour filter. This, it is claimed, expands the projector’s colour coverage to 100 per cent of the DCI-P3 colour gamut used in the digital cinema world.
The W4000i’s connections are par for the projector course, with highlights being two HDMI ports (plus the separate bay for the smart ‘dongle’), a 12V trigger jack, an RS232C port for adding the projector to a wider home cinema control system, and a
