Premium Home Projector Comparison: BenQ W5800 vs. Epson LS12000 & Sony VPL-XW5000

 As an AV consultant for almost 30 years, I'm often asked about the best 4K home theater projectors under $7K USD ($10K CAD). They almost always ask what I prefer if I’m buying one for myself. And here is what I’ve been telling them lately… get the BenQ W5800 4K Laser Projector. That’s the end of the article unless you want more details. 

I personally have done deep-dive tests with several projectors within the same price range including Epson LS12000 and Sony VPL-XW5000. But still, even with their strengths, I prefer the BenQ W5800. 

Let’s start with the UHD standard. UHD is not only about having 4K resolution. More importantly, the standard requires a minimum of DCI-P3 colour space, 10-bit colour depth and gradations, and HDR. Because of the HDR requirements, a certain level of brightness needs to be achieved and the more light intensity, the better the image quality will be. 

Let’s also address with the elephant in the room. The DLP chip size used in W5800 is smaller than many other projectors. All things being equal, that is a detriment as the larger chip size the better the image quality will be. However, other aspects of the projectors combined still make the W5800 to be better than its competitions. 

The larger the lens size, the better the image quality will be. This helps the projector to achieve better lens uniformity than pretty much all projectors at the same price range out there. The use of the smaller DLP chip, in this case, makes the ratio between chip size and lens diameter more ideal to achieve the same level of sharpness be it in the center of the screen and at the corners of the projected image. 

The use of glass lens elements also contributes to the colour uniformity of the projected image and eliminates glare within the lens assembly. Less glare means more vivid colour reproduction without haze. Once you see a glass-lens projector, there is no turning back to plastic lenses. 

The most ideal location to install a projector is where the centre of lens is smack dab in the centre of the screen. However, most probably that is not the case. Yes, you can use digital keystone to compensate the off-centre location of the projector but that approach can reduce the resolution up to 50%. Quantitatively not ideal. After all, what’s the point in getting a 4K home theater projector and reducing the image quality by up to 50%? The ideal way of doing this without sacrificing quality is by having physical lens shift functionality in the projector.

Within reason, the image shifting is done physically within the lens to maintain the resolution. Furthermore, by having great quality lens uniformity, you will not experience image softening at the corners of the lens assembly’s light path when using lens shift. 

There are three main light sources used by projectors. LED, regular bulb and laser. Each light source has some variants such as, for example, 3-LED, 3-laser and the list goes on. Because of the need for brightness for HDR, laser is the most recommended option. Unfortunately, however, the more budget option of laser light source creates visible artefacts such as halo and sparkles also known as Helmholtz-Kohlrausch Effect which can be distracting and jarring. The BenQ W5800 use the type of laser which has the least amount of Helmholtz-Kohlrausch Effect on the market. 

Part of the UHD standard is the colour space. While HD is only using REC709 colour space, UHD uses DCI-P3 colour space which is about 25% wider than REC709. Most projectors, however, can’t do the DCI-P3 without using filter which in return lessens the brightness by upwards to 25%. Making things worse, there are many projectors that can not even reproduce REC709 colour space! With the BenQ W5800, however, it achieves 100% DCI-P3 without using a filter, maintaining the luminance prowess of the projector. 

While the Epson LS12000 and Sony X5000 have inherently deeper blacks, they don’t have an effective HDR tone mapping, something that is needed for the appearance of blacker blacks. The  BenQ W5800, however, has a highly effective HDR Pro which analyses the content and adjusts accordingly on a frame-by-frame basis by calculating and enhancing the HDR performance in a thousand zones within its frame resulting a near perfect HDR reproduction while at the same time produces black level that appears as good, or even better, than its competitions. 

About the Author

David Susilo is a Level 3 Imaging Science and THX Certified Calibrator and Trainer with a PhD in Psychoacoustics. He’s been an AV consultant for both consumer level and commercials and has a YouTube channel; David Susilo Unscripted