Benq V6050
With bags of brightness and an impressive speaker, this ultra short throw projector is worthy of consideration
The Benq V6050 ultra short throw (UST) projector is aiming to replace your TV. Brighter than the average projector and with a soundbar built in, it certainly has the right specs, with its laser light source, 120-inch maximum screen size and easy set-up features. Indeed, this Benq certainly talks a good talk.
UST has proved a tricky space for projectors. Burgeoning technologies such as this don’t come cheap, and the pure picture quality is rarely as good as you might expect from a traditional machine at even half the price. Spend a little more and you could get a native 4K projector. Traditional projectors don’t come with the same ease of installation or feature flexibility, so if that’s what you’re after, a UST is where it’s at. This Benq might just be the best of them to date, currently priced £3999, with some retailers throwing in Benq’s ALR projector screen.
Fiddly to get right
Physically, the Benq V6050 is fairly typical of a UST projector – about as tall and deep as an AV receiver but, at 50cm wide, somewhat broader. It features a 2x 5W sound system with a pair of twodriver trevolo speakers, engineered by Benq’s professional speaker brand.
The short-throw lens beams the projection almost straight up at your screen. You can create an image of between 70in and 120in by placing the projector from 7cm to 33cm away from your screen. There are a couple of retractable metal rods on the rear of the V6050 to help you measure up. Just as crucial is the vertical distance between the projector and the bottom of your screen, ideally between 16cm and 31cm.
It can be fiddly getting all that right – small movements make a big difference and patience is required. The feet screw in and out to level off the projector and make sure your picture isn’t skewed. There are no big lens shift or zoom features; it’s a fixed lens and only a little fine-tuning with the motor focus setting in the Installation menu is needed to sharpen up the edges.
The light that’s projected begins with the 3000 Ansi-lumens laser at the machine’s core, before the image is formed via a 0.47in DMD (digital micromirror device). It’s then sent through a colour wheel and focused through the lens. Those sensitive to the rainbow fringing from DLP (digital light processing) projectors may notice the artifacts on the picture.
A decent choice of inputs and outputs includes two HDMI 2.0 ports and two USB 2.0 slots for local files or hard drives, plus an extra powered one on the back. You can outsource the audio by using the S/PDIF socket or HDMI ARC. There’s no smart platform or wi-fi connection, though you can easily plug in a media streamer or buy one of Benq’s dongles. There’s a good-sized, backlit remote control of the calibre one might expect of a native 4K machine too.
Viable TV alternative
There’s certainly enough brightness from the Benq V6050 to watch a film, TV show or sporting event with the lights on. You won’t see much in broad daylight though, unless you have a particularly specialised screen. With our reference, reflective, moderately high-gain screen, side lighting is as far as we can take it before the best of the picture fades away.
The V6050 still offers something beyond most traditional home cinema projectors, though, making it a viable alternative for your main living space. We watch Guardians Of The Galaxy 2 on 4K Blu-ray and there’s a respectable amount of HDR picture punch for a projector of this price thanks, in part, to the solid black depth that DLP technology brings. There’s a single HDR preset, but we’d recommend bringing the contrast down a little to maximise tonal detail.
More care is required while calibrating colour. There are a fair few colour controls to consider – Color Enhancer, Flesh Tone, Color Temperature, Brilliant Color and Wide Color Gamut as well as the standard colour setting. That makes for a lot of permutations, but we get the best results with the Wide Color Gamut turned off, the Cool temperature preset, and a light touch on the Brilliant Color filter.
Once locked in, there’s an enjoyable balance to the early scene in which our heroes tackle the inter-dimensional ‘space monkey’. There’s a lovely rich golden tone to the anulax battery power sources, some wonderful kaleidoscopic colours to the rainbow blasts of the Abilisk’s quantum splatters and the right kind of green colour to Gamora’s skin. There isn’t much life in the motion processing, but the native motion handling abilities of this projector are good enough not to jar.
At 1080p with Captain America: Civil War on Blu-ray, the look and feel is on a par with the higher-res picture. Given that it matches the panel’s native resolution, there’s no pixel-shifting or scaling required. There’s less colour processing to worry about and it’s easier for user calibration. We keep the contrast near the middle to maintain some comparable dynamism to the HDR performance. During the rooftop fight in Bucharest there’s an enjoyable contrast between Black Panther’s suit, the light concrete and the bright sky. There’s good texture on the pavement below too, as well as on Cap’s shield. The underpass tunnels look good too, accented by the vibrant orange of the tiled walls. It all makes for a great big-screen watch.
But the picture lacks a little subtlety in terms of colour and tone. The darker scenes in both films – the opener of Civil
War with the Winter Soldier on a night
mission, and the Berhert ambush in Guardians 2, for example – are both short on shadow detail. The finer points of the Ravagers’ outfits and Bucky’s motorbike rather disappear into a charcoal haze.
For colour, it’s missing a degree of complexity. Tones are more uniform than they should be and, as ever, it’s most obvious with faces. Peter Quill’s is noticeably a little less than natural as we watch in 4K. Objects sometimes stand out a little in a way they shouldn’t, too. The yellow street lines in the Lagos scene in Civil War are rendered simplistically as flat blocks of colour but we have seen these issues before on entry-level laser-based devices and, so far, we’ve not seen a better example of a UST.
More low resolution content is likely to be on the menu for a UST, if indeed it is positioned as a TV replacer, and we’re pleased to note that the V6050 does as well as can be expected for any 4K projector on that front. We take the brightness and sharpness down a fair bit to get a good picture as we watch Sunshine on DVD but there’s still a fair amount of detail. It’s soft but watchable.
Remarkably wide soundstage
Two 5W speakers might not sound much, but this trevolo-speaker sound system is really quite good. There are a few presets and EQ access, but we stick with Standard to find the best performance. The V6050 has a big chassis and we’re surprised there’s nothing more complex here than a pair of forward-facing speakers made up of tweeters and mid/bass cones. Nonetheless, we still get a remarkably wide soundstage
“There’s a respectable amount of HDR picture punch for a projector of this price thanks, in part, to the solid black depth that digital light processing technology brings”
that is particularly enjoyable during the space battle with the Sovereign drones in Guardians Of The Galaxy 2. There’s an excellent swing of the audio from left to right as Star Lord’s craft dodges laser blasts and the excitement is fuelled by the rather impressive dynamics. There’s a big growl to the rattling engines each time it flies by the camera and a real solidity to every shot and moment of impact.
There’s also a well-tuned balance, ensuring that all parts of the range are easy to hear with nothing too booming nor too bright. The top-end is marginally less developed than the bottom, but it rarely detracts from the action. We’d like a little more volume – we find most of our listening is almost at the limit – and if this were an external soundbar, we’d be looking for a better sense of rhythm too. As it is, though, this sound system is far more than an interesting trinket for this projector. It adds to the package, underlining the case for the V6050 as an all-in-one machine.
We’re not convinced that the Benq V6050 is bright enough to replace your living room TV, but it certainly has plenty to offer. The big, bold picture is reasonably detailed, colourful and enjoyable to watch. The built-in sound system could be described in similar terms. For those looking for that big screen projector feel without needing lots of kit, this UST machine is one of the best around at this price. Adding a media streamer and possibly a better external speaker will level it up further. For the time being, it won’t perform quite as well as a traditional projector in terms of pure picture but, given its extra brightness and functionality, it makes for a compelling package.