EPSON EH-LS300/500
ultra-short-throw projectors
Ultra-short-throw projectors have evolved to include TV-like operation, while prices are tumbling. Is this the future of bigscreen viewing?
Ultra-short-throw projectors are going great guns. Even mainstream companies not previously or no longer involved in projection (LG, Samsung, Hisense) have realised that a projector sitting on a bench can deliver a large-screen ‘TV-like’ experience with a convenience that a conventional projector cannot when it has to be pushed back in the room or hung on a ceiling.
As a consequence the ultra-short-throw is rapidly evolving. Since it’s going to work like a TV, shouldn’t it have speakers? Shouldn’t it be smart, like a TV? Yes it should. So here comes Epson, a company which declares itself the world no.1 in projection (on the reasonable basis it has been declared so by Futuresource Consulting for the last 17 consecutive years), with new models for just this space, the EH-LS500 (see overleaf) and this EH-LS300. With such underlying expertise, does it deliver the promised new age of UST?
Equipment
Ultra-short-throw projectors use a combination of lenses and mirrors to cast the picture up onto a screen almost immediately above them. The Epson EpiqVision EH-LS300B is a fairly compact specimen at 467mm wide and 400mm deep. Inside there are three 15.5mm LCD projector panels using Epson’s C2 Fine technology, and a laser diode. That kind of light engine works by firing the laser into some phosphor, which then produces a bright white light.
The use of this kind of light engine means several good things. Firstly, long life. The projector is rated at 20,000 hours of lamp life. Secondly, the projector turns on fast — 5.5 seconds when in standby, according to our stopwatch, or 6.5 seconds if it has been disconnected from power. It goes off fast as well.
And the lamp can be controlled in level to help darken scenes. Epson says that the dynamic contrast ratio is as much as 2.5 million-to-1 (on the datasheet) or 1.5 million-to-1 (in the US manual we found online).
There are two HDMI inputs, a USB socket for playing back video content from a USB stick, and Wi-Fi for the smart TV stuff. Surprisingly, there’s no Ethernet connection — we’d prefer that option rather than having to rely on Wi-Fi in our somewhat RF-congested modern environments. But it is dual-band Wi-Fi — 2.4GHz and 5GHz — supporting the 801.11ac standard, so it may well outperform the usually-installed 100Mbps Ethernet of many devices. (Our 100Mbps test clip was pretty choppy... but we do have an extremely busy Wi-Fi environment.)
A nice touch: built-in sound that is quite good. As always, we believe that the sound of your system should match the scale of the video. Since the Epson EpiqVision EH-LS300B delivers big vision, a decent external sound system should be in order. But absent that, we were quite impressed with the audio built into the projector. Epson relied on the audio expertise of Yamaha for this: a 2.1-channel forwards-firing audio system with 20W of power, better than any actual TV that we’ve used — and we’ve used plenty. We also checked the Audio Return Channel capability via HDMI to a connected home theatre receiver, and it worked perfectly well.
The projector is available on its own at just under $4000. But you can also get it as a package with an ‘Ambient Light Rejection’ screen in 100 inches ($5099 package) or
120 inches ($5699). These employ a surface treatment which reduces the reflection of light coming from above or directly in front, increasing their contrast ratio when there’s light in the room. These screens weren’t available to us at the time of review, so we used our regular viewing screen.
Setting up
In a couple of ways an ultra-short-throw projector is a little trickier to set up than a regular projector. There is no zoom lens, for example, so the size of the picture is determined entirely by the distance between the projector and the screen — far less than a conventional projector, but still signficiant for the largest screen sizes. For a 100-inch screen, the distance from the wall to the back of the projector (the side facing the wall) should be 26.6cm. With the largest recommended screen size of 120 inches, the distance is just 38.6cm. The projector itself is getting on for 40cm deep, so its front will end up more than 75cm from the wall — which is a lot of bench depth.
The other slightly tricky thing is that the image is cast at such an extreme angle you have to adjust everything with better-thanmillimetre precision. The slightest angle to one side and you have a marked trapezoid of a picture. You really don’t want to be nudging the projector when you’re dusting.
But there is a clever adjustment system for picture geometry. There’s even a dedicated button on the remote. With this you can drag the corners of a box to make sure everything’s square. It’s kind of like a supercharged keystone correction system. But like keystone correction, it’s done digitally, which means that Full-HD input signals are no longer directly mapped onto the display pixels, so detail is lost. So it’s best avoided if you can. Get the physical placement right instead.
Last thing on physical set-up: we found the focus adjust lever quite spongy, so a bit tricky to get the focus exactly right. With perseverance we did succeed. (One of the oddities about this kind of projector: focus adjustment has basically no effect at all at the bottom of the screen, which is always in focus, and a massive effect at the top.)
As for the smart set-up, Android TV has this well under control. You just use the Google Home app on your phone — it works on iPhones as well — which talks you through with very little fuss. We had the unit connected within a couple of minutes.
Performance
It turns out that 3600 lumens allows a surprisingly viewable picture even under the full glare of our room’s fluorescent tubes! Not that we did any kind of critical viewing that way, we hasten to add. But we suspect that kids would be perfectly satisfied with afternoon cartoons served this way, especially onto an Epson directional screen. And it’s fine for the news and such. So consider this not just a home cinema device, but a (kind of) everyday TV.
Then, when night fell, we started to use it as a real home cinema projector. And we were impressed. What impressed us? The colour and the black levels. The subjective black levels were entirely satisfying. Which is to say that with all the material we viewed — including HDR content from 4K Blu-ray — the black elements of the picture seemed, well, entirely black. And yes, 4K Blu-ray, because even though the projector delivers 1080p output, it supports Ultra-HD inputs including HDR (and Dolby Vision, which it treats as HDR).
“The extremely long-life light source makes this unit practical for everyday use, with some limitations, as well as for truly immersive bigscreen movie nights...”