EPSON EH-TW7100 AV projector
Projection is the path to truly bigscreen images, and Epson’s 4K Pro-UHD solution brings brilliant and eco-friendly images to your home at an attractive price.
Projection is the path to truly bigscreen images, and Epson’s 4K Pro-UHD solution brings brilliant eco-friendly images at an attractive price.
Now that there are plenty of 4K projectors on the market, it feels second-best to opt for a full-HD model with just a quarter of the pixels you get with 4K (Ultra High Definition is the more accurate term, but even we have now started saying 4K for short).
Of course the issue is price — indeed since the 4Kers have arrived, there are some astounding prices out there on decent full-HD projectors.
Yet wait — here comes Epson with the EH-TW7100, equipped with its 4K Pro-UHD feature, complete with a dedicated 4K Pixel-Shift processor, and a price-tag of $2649. We remember back when even full-HD projectors were up around $10,000. So this appears a bargain. But it isn’t native 4K, where a full 4K’s worth of pixels are delivered in one hit from a single chip. Such projectors remain expensive, and are often physically large. Instead it uses pixel shifting, where a smaller chip is used several times per frame to deliver higher resolution. But this Epson, and 4K Pro UHD in general, also delivers something else — proof that there’s more to an excellent projection image than just pixel count.
Equipment
The imaging technology in the Epson EH-TW7100 involves three full-HD polysilicon TFT active matrix LCD panels, long Epson’s projection technology of choice. Each panel is 15.5mm wide. It aims to use these to achieve higher than full-HD resolution by means of pixel shifting. Unlike some other techniques, this one involves shifting once diagonally, delivering to two rather than four separate positions per frame.
Despite the 4K tag in the name, even Epson admits it’s not creating true 4K. The specifications call it ‘4K Enhancement’, saying “4K Enhancement Technology (4Ke) shifts each pixel diagonally to double Full HD resolution: 1920 × 1080 × 2.”
So that’s half the pixel count of 4K. But by laying the pixels over each other with a slight overlap, and doing some clever picture processing in advance, Epson claims to deliver something more than the sum of its parts. As we’ll see, the proof of that is in the pudding.
The projector itself is an attractive and curvy design in white, well suited to blending in with ceilings when mounted upside-down, if less than ideal for darkened dedicated theatre rooms where you’d want everything to be black to avoid reflections. This is more one of those intermediate designs, bringing some features from semi-portable models into real home cinema.
It has built-in speakers for example. Heaven forbid you’d use them for a big movie night, though they are at least stereo. Think of them as a useful fallback for casual use. For larger sound, you should be sending the audio direct from your sources to a nicely crankable sound system. There is a minijack analogue audio output, but
that won’t provide the quality of the original source, especially a digital one, and is, of course, limited to stereo. The same applies to the built-in Bluetooth, which can send audio to external speakers or headphones, bearing in mind the always present possibility of latency (delay) when sending audio via Bluetooth.
There are no analogue inputs, just two HDMI ins, and importantly these are rated to accept 4K UHD signals at up to 60Hz: 8 bits for 4:4:4 colour resolution, 10 bits for 4:2:2. Since 4K Blu-ray discs only ever use 4:2:0 colour resolution but do usually employ 10 or more bits, make sure your player outputs the lower colour resolution to allow the greater bit depth to come through.
There are also two USB sockets, and these are ripe for a streaming device, since one of them provides only power for a device which is itself plugged into HDMI. The other is for use with Epson’s Wi-Fi dongle, an optional purchase allowing you to mirror stuff from a phone or computer to the projector.
The projector’s zoom range is 1.62:1, with both vertical and horizontal lens shift provided, allowing distortion-free alignment of picture and screen. All the controls are manual. For a 100-inch (2.54-metre) diagonal image, the projector needs to be placed between 2.95 and 4.77 metres from the screen.
Performance
Installation was straightforward on our ceiling mount, thanks to the two-dimensional lens shift and a good zoom range.
How does the image look? Let’s get the resolution question out of the way first. As the company admits, Epson’s 4K Pro UHD system doesn’t deliver pixel-for-pixel
UHD. It does, however, deliver an image which is far improved over 1080p (twice as good, you might say, given the pixel doubling). And we have noted in the past that the resolution advantage of UHD isn’t all that obvious even on displays that can clearly resolve it. Halfway was certainly enough to make Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk look glorious. This 4K Blu-ray is delivered at 60 frames per second, and the higher frame rate tends to deliver a subjective boost in sharpness.
As for brightness and contrast, Epson’s 3LCD panel technology gives them an advantage over the likes of DLP. All three colours are full-on all the time, compared with systems that use a colour wheel to produce the colours from one white light source. So Epson’s primary colours are as bright as its whites, something others cannot claim. Here you could really see and accept that effect as real. Hence the projector can claim 3000 lumens both for white and for colour. Given that not so long ago a decent AV projector brightness was still less than a thousand lumens, you’ve probably got brightness to spare. You may not need all of it, so lesser brightness settings can be used, which extend your lamp life.
One note here is that Epson’s motion smoothing systems are disabled when the 4K enhancement mode for non-4K content is on. Hollywood has started telling us not to use motion processing if we want to see what the director intended anyway, so perhaps that’s no great loss. If you skip the 4K enhancement you can switch in one of its three levels of motion processing for standard Blu-rays and other 1080 material, but the processing isn’t class-leading anyway, so we’d suggest just leaving it off.
Deinterlacing was not a total success in our tests. Epson projectors used to have both auto and forced deinterlacing settings, but they seem to have abandoned the force-film option, so if you feed this projector an interlaced signal, you must choose from ‘Off’, ‘Video’ or ‘Video/ Film’. That last auto system was fairly mediocre. On our standard test clips, it way too often incorrectly chose video when film would be appropriate. And it often flickered between the two modes very quickly.
So you’ll be better converting signals to progressive scan earlier in the chain, if your source allows (and does better).
Now, how about our comment that 4K is not all about resolution? One of 4K’s higher-impact improvements is that difference between 10 bits compared to eight. Eight bits can describe 256 levels of something. Ten bits can discriminate 1024 levels. Regular Blu-ray has eight bits per colour per pixel, allowing 16.7 million colours. Sounds good, but if some colour or brightness gradient is of similar colour mix, it isn’t defined by millions of levels, not even by thousands, but by those 256 levels, and that’s when you can see ‘banding’ across large areas of sky and other one-colour areas. Ten bits makes the difference.
The Epson can use the 4K colour and brightness information to deliver all the benefits, and while we don’t reckon HDR is really something projectors can do much with, there were clear differences between watching a standard Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray of the same scene — detailing, colour accuracy, and yes, detail in shadows.
One final ability which surprised us was its delivery of mere 576p material from DVD. This projector does such a good job on upscaling to the projector’s resolution that it almost looks like the source material is full-HD.
Conclusion
So no, it’s not native 4K, or even pixel-shifted 4K. But this projector’s other advantages put it ahead of some which are, especially the latter type. In terms of the overall image quality, deinterlacing aside, this is an excellent AV projector — at a very attractive price.