STATE OF THE ART

Get the big-screen movie experience with these 4K HdR projectors

Upgrade your man cave (or your lounge) to cinema-standard with these eye-popping 4K HDR projectors.

To take your home cinema experience to the next level, you need a projector. Nothing brings home the bigscreen experience better than a wall of Wonder Woman.

But since the TV market shifted to UHD a while back, home projector makers have been left playing catch-up. The first Ultra HD projectors were ruinously expensive (not to mention huge). Thankfully, there’s new hope for 4K film fanatics. The first affordable HDR (High Dynamic Range) capable DLP projectors have finally landed.

But what should you look for in a 4K projector and how do competing technologies compare? We’ve been taking a closer look at 4K DLP models from Acer and Optoma, and an HDR upgrade to Epson’s 4K LCD flagship.

Big-screen projection and 4K is a marriage made in heaven. While it’s difficult to perceive differences in clarity between 1080p images and 2160p on small TVs, that four-fold jump in resolution becomes far more obvious on a screen 100+ inches across. Fine detail and texture unseen on a 43-inch UHD flatscreen becomes crisp and dramatic.

But there’s a significant difference between TVs and projectors when it comes to HDR. While televisions can boost specific spectral highlights (sunshine, lights, Hollywood teeth), projector lamps can’t do the same thing. To do so would require enormous brightness and generate massive amounts of heat. Such light canons can be accommodated at your multiplex, but not in your living room.

So how does our trio perform? Let’s dim the lights and find out…