Epson delivers its brightest UST home entertainment projector yet
View online review whf.cm/EpiqVision
Epson’s new laser-lit EH-LS800W is very much focused on home entertainment, an area in which Epson has previously delivered on, to What Hi-Fi? Award-winning success.
The LS800W is pitched as a premium UST projector, and features such as a huge 4000 lumens of claimed brightness, a laser lighting engine and surprisingly flexible image size support all contribute to its relatively high-end status. Given that the LS800W’s chief appeal is as an alternative to a gigantic TV, its price looks like good value compared with those typically attached to 98in and bigger TVs.
The crisp white finish of the projector’s top edge contrasts neatly with a light grey fabric wrapped around its front edge, while tastefully ribbed sides and gleaming silver feet enhance the premium feel. The LS800W’s unusually large footprint, meanwhile, hopefully points to an unusually powerful integrated sound system, an unusually evolved heat dispersion/noise control system, or a premium internal optical system – or maybe even a combination of all three.
Spectacularly bright
Thanks to a laser-lit LCD optical system, the EH-LS800W’s peak brightness output is quoted as a spectacularly bright 4000 lumens. That’s 1900 lumens more than you get with the Hisense PL1, and 1000 lumens more than you get with the Leica Cine 1. The more brightness a projector can output, the more potential it has for punching through the ambient light so often present in regular living rooms.
High brightness also matters when it comes to a projector being able to get value out of high dynamic range images.
The LS800W’s extreme brightness also has an advantage when it comes to size of watchably bright images – Epson claims up to 150in, where many rivals ‘top out’ at 120 or even just 100in. There’s even a bit of lens zoom to accommodate the 80-150in claimed image size range, something you rarely see with UST projectors.
Being able to go notionally that big puts a bit of clear blue water both between the Epson and most UST rivals, and between the LS800W and anything remotely affordable in the king-sized TV market. The Epson’s TV credentials are boosted by an unusually varied set of picture adjustments by projector standards, including a multi-level automatic contrast adjustment, a very flexible Super Resolution feature for bolstering sharpness
