BenQ W2720i Review – Trusted Reviews

Introduction

Most projectors fall pretty squarely into one of two camps.

They’re either serious home cinema projectors designed for dark rooms and shorn of such ‘froth’ as built-in sound and smart streaming systems, or else they’re living room projectors designed to work in less than ideal viewing conditions with lots of convenience features but potentially compromised picture performance.

And experience suggests that projectors such as the BenQ W2720i that try to cross that divide tend to come a bit of a cropper.

So can this £1799 BenQ mid-ranger buck that unfortunate crossover trend? Or is it more proof that when it comes to projection you really do need to pick a side and stick with it?

Design

• Clever blend of lifestyle and ‘serious’ features
• Backlit buttons on the remote
• Recessed lens to reduce potential damage

The W2720i’s design cunningly straddles the dedicated theatre and living room projector worlds. It’s a bit bigger than most living room projectors, but not as enormous as many of the best home theatre projectors, while its gloss-free mid grey exterior with its textured top and sides treads a tidy line between no-nonsense seriousness and living room appeal.

The W2720i’s rounded edges and corners give it a soft but not frivolous look, and the projector is weighty enough to feel like it has some quality innards inside without being so heavy that you can’t pretty easily move it around your home or put it away and get out again if you only want to use it from time to time.

The remote control continues the mix of serious and lifestyle by combining an attractive rounded shape and glossy white finish with a thoughtful button layout and backlighting behind the buttons that means you can still see what they do even in a blacked out movie room.

User Experience

• Ergonomic and backlight remote control
• Google Voice search and Google Assistant enabled
• Familiar Android TV core interface

The W2720i is more straightforward and flexible to use than many projectors. For starters, as well as its remote being comfortable to hold and sporting backlit buttons it carries a built in mic so that you can send spoken search terms to the projector using Android TV’s Google Assistant system.

The Android TV menus will be familiar to many through the system’s popularity as a TV smart platform, and they’re visual enough in their approach to be fairly straightforward for novices to learn their way round.

Android TV is not as clever at tracking your viewing habits and making relevant recommendations as some smart systems, but it’s still more than you find on most ‘serious’ projectors.

BenQ’s own projector set up and control menus can be accessed separately to the Android TV interface, saving you from having to go through Android TV for every little tweak, and they’re pretty straightforward in structure and rich in options.

One final way of controlling the W2720i is a row of control buttons at the back of the projector’s right hand side for those times when the remote control has been swallowed by a black hole again.

Features

• 4K HDR playback
• 4K/120Hz gaming support
• LED lighting with 30,000 hours of lamp life

The W2720i has a lot going on for a projector you can buy at the time of writing for £1799 / $2499. 

Starting with its use of an LED lighting system to illuminate its DLP-type optics. This yields such advantages as a 30,000-hour claimed maintenance-free lifespan, reduced cooling fan noise, and a few startling specifications including a claimed 2,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio and coverage of up to 90% of the DCI-P3 colour spectrum used in most HDR mastering.

The W2720i’s maximum brightness is quoted at 2500 lumens. That’s down a fair bit on the sort of figures I’m seeing from more single-mindedly living room focused projectors these days – but it’s very in line with the sort of figures we tend to get with dedicated home theatre projectors.

The W2720i’s home theatre appeal is further bolstered by its provision of a Filmmaker Mode, designed to meet the requirements of the UHD Alliance to provide consumers with a simple shortcut to seeing content as it was designed to look by its creators. The projector even ships having already received a factory calibration, too.

In keeping with the W2720i’s apparent desire to be all things to all AV fans, it also has plenty of appeal to casual users. On the picture front there’s a series of presets that target a more dynamic, richly saturated picture presentation than the Filmmaker Mode provides, and a handy HDR Pro option works, like the HDR dynamic tone mapping systems found in TVs, to continually optimise the presentation of HDR images to the projector’s capabilities.

Unusually, the W2720i’s bid to fit into the casual as well as home theatre projector worlds sees it carrying an AI Cinema Mode option that takes ambient room conditions into account as well as analysing image content when figuring out how best to display whatever you’re watching.

Set up is simplified, meanwhile, by a screen fit system that automatically matches the projector’s images to the size of your screen. Manual focus and (1.3x) zoom facilities are provided under a sliding cover above the lens barrel, along with a vertical optical image shift wheel. The projector’s menus further provide the option to correct the image’s geometry via eight adjustable points.

A CineMaster submenu provides a selection of image processing options for enhancing colours, sharpness, motion fluidity, and contrast. These features work with varying degrees of success, and all need to be approached with caution since they can start to have a detrimental effect on picture quality if pushed too hard. Overall, though, they’re worth at least experimenting with.

The W2720i’s connections include an impressive three HDMI ports rather than the two most projectors are limited to, as well as two useful USB ports (one offering power for video streaming sticks), an optical digital audio output, a 3.5mm audio output, plus RS-232C and 12V trigger ports to aid integration of the W2720i into a wider integrated control system.

There’s also built-in Wi-Fi support to feed the Android TV smart system, and it turns out that one of the three HDMI inputs can handle 4K/120Hz game feeds from PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles – though the HFR support doesn’t extend to variable refresh rates. You can also use one of the HDMI inputs to pass sound, even Dolby Atmos soundtracks, to audio devices compatible with HDMI’s audio return channel (ARC) feature.

Android TV is better implemented on the W2720i than it is on most projectors. It’s slicker and more stable, and features better integration of the main streaming apps than most projectors manage. In other words, most of the key apps are aware of the capabilities (4K, HDR, HDR10+) of the projector they’re installed on and can adapt their performance accordingly.

Such integration is actually a key feature when it comes to getting a consistently good performance from an online projector.

While the W2720i’s Android TV system supports most of the big global streaming services, such as Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV, it doesn’t carry all of the UK terrestrial broadcaster catchup apps. There’s no BBC iPlayer, Channel 4 or ITVX support. If you want these you’ll need to add an external streaming device.

Wrapping up a generally impressive ‘crossover’ projector feature count are support for 3D for anyone still invested in that, and HDR support that extends, as noted in passing earlier, to the HDR10+ HDR format. HDR10+ provides compatible devices with extra scene by scene image information to help displays deliver more accurate results.

Picture Quality

• Impressive contrast and colour
• Outstanding sharpness and detail
• Unusually excellent streaming picture quality

Concerns that the W2720i’s apparent desire to appeal to both premium home theatre fans and living room users might leave its picture performance stuck between two stools evaporate almost instantly. This really is a projector that can deliver the goods pretty much wherever you want to use it.

The first thing that struck me about the W2720i’s pictures was how phenomenally sharp and detailed they look. Its optical engine doesn’t deliver a ‘true’ 4K performance in the sense of a dedicated DLP mirror for each pixel in a 4K picture, but the Texas Instruments XPR pixel shifting/repeat mirror ‘flashing’ per frame system yields such dense, sharp and detailed images that it’s hard not to agree with the Consumer Technology Association’s assertion that what you’re seeing is actually 4K.

The purity and density of the image means it holds up well at really large screen sizes, as well as helping to paint an impressively three-dimensional world even when you’re not actually making use of the projector’s 3D capabilities.

There’s nothing forced about this sharpness either, so long as you don’t become too enthusiastic with the CineMaster Pixel Enhancer feature. Instead it just feels like the natural result of multiple elements of the W2720i’s pictures working in perfect harmony.

Colour, for instance, as well as being vibrant and rich are also full of nuance and tonal shifts so subtle that they’re able to achieve the same sort of finesse you might hope to see on a top quality 4K TV screen. All without any noise or striping/banding interference.

This helps objects in a picture take on a more solid, authentic look, as well as underlining the sense of fine detail and texture.

Credible colour saturations are retained in dark sequences too, avoiding the washed out effect or green tinge that some projectors suffer with when showing such scenes, while skin tones look consistently impressively natural and nuanced regardless of whether they’re appearing in a bright or dark setting.

No colours feel out of kilter with any others, either. They all seem to be singing from the same colour spectrum hymn sheet, with no tone feeling too strong or weak. This again plays a big part in enabling the W2720i’s pictures to achieve as much subtlety and insight as they do.

Calman Ultimate HDR ColorChecker tests reveal a DeltaE 2000 average error score of 4.61 in the all-round most engaging HDR10 picture preset, which is admirably close to the three or less average error level where even a trained eye can’t detect deviations from the established industry video standards. This DeltaE 2000 average error figure drops to just 3.4 with SDR content, too.

The W2720i’s handling of light is exemplary for a sub-£2k projector. Bright HDR scenes look if anything more punchy than you might expect from the claimed 2,500 lumens of maximum brightness – an impression bolstered by the projector’s ability to retain deeper black colours during dark scenes than most HDR-friendly projectors while simultaneously retaining plenty of subtle shadow details.

This combination of bright HDR, convincing black tones and subtle dark details really is a hard mix for projectors to achieve, yet the W2720i makes it look easy.

The W2720i also handles motion well, even with the 24fps films that might well make up much of such a talented projector’s content diet. Judder never looks exaggerated even with no motion processing in play – though if you do fancy making things look a little smoother, the gentlest of BenQ’s motion options takes the edge off judder without smoothing things out so much that films start to look like Eastenders.

The W2720i adapts to SDR effortlessly if no HDR version of something you want to watch is available, and turns out to be a fantastically enjoyable big-screen gaming display – despite the fact that it doesn’t support variable refresh rates and, oddly, doesn’t provide a dedicated Game preset. Its innate crispness and vibrancy plays perfectly with today’s game graphics, and if you set the projector’s processing system to Fast and then follow the further instructions the projector issues regarding essentially turning off as many processing options as possible, the time the W2720i takes to render images drops to just 17.8ms – a very game-friendly result by projector standards.

One final area where the W2720i’s pictures stand out is with the quality of its streaming. I’ve never seen images from a built-in projector smart system that look as clean, 4K (where a 4K stream is available), precise and natural. Netflix in particular looks gorgeous. This is a big deal considering how many people now use streamed video as their main movie source.

The W2720i’s picture are so good for its money that it seems almost churlish to mention its one or two limitations. But I guess I wouldn’t be doing my job right if I didn’t, so…

First, while the W2720i’s HDR presentation does look HDR, it isn’t as full on bright looking as it is with some more aggressive projectors out there. Though I’d argue that, actually, presenting a more compelling light range like the W2720i does, in the sense that there are decent black colours to go with the vibrant colours and peak whites, is overall preferable to just pumping out more brightness.

The ‘hard’ upper limit to the W2720i’s brightness can cause the very brightest, whitest parts of the picture to sometimes suffer with clipping, though, where subtle shading information is essentially bleached out of the picture. Especially if you’re watching in the Filmmaker Mode. Though the sort of content areas that cause this don’t crop up all that often.

Finally, while the W2720i’s dynamic light controls are mostly remarkably assured, consistent and effective without being distracting, just occasionally the projector’s usually impressive black levels can suddenly jump up into greyness if a particularly intense bright highlight suddenly pops into view against a dark backdrop. Especially if you’re using one of the projector’s relatively dynamic picture presets.

That pretty much wraps up everything I managed to put in the W2720i’s negative column, though – and it’s barely a drop in the ocean of everything the projector gets right.

Sound Quality

• 2 x 5W system
• Limited bass

While building a speaker system inside the W2720i is a nice touch from a convenience perspective, you should only think of it as an audio option of last resort. For one thing it just can’t get very loud. Even cranked up to its maximum setting it sounds too muted and faint to adequately accompany the sort of epic images the projector can produce.

Bass during heavy action scenes or punchy musical moments tends to sound more trapped inside the W2720i’s belly than mid-range and treble sounds, too, leaving it sounding a bit dislocated from the rest of the mix.

There are a couple of positives to report as well, though. Starting with the fact that while it doesn’t rumble its way out of the W2720i’s ‘cage’ as expansively as I’d like, bass does have a quite rounded tone that stops it sounding thin and wimpy, and also tends to avoid the sort of crackling and drop out issues so rife with underpowered speakers.

Also, while bass might suffer with locked in syndrome, other frequencies are cast fairly nicely beyond the projector’s chassis, creating a decently substantial and detailed soundstage that’s just missing that key element of heft.

Should you buy it?

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