BENQ TK700STI 4K projector
Grab your SMG and prepare for action – BenQ’s TK700Sti is a next-gen gaming-optimised 4K DLP projector.
Grab your SMG and prepare for action – BenQ’s TK700Sti is a next-gen 4K DLP projector with dedicated gaming-optimised modes.
It’s game on with BenQ’s very latest projector, which comes with special game modes to make the most of gaming in general and the new Xbox and PlayStation consoles in particular. It could also be described as one step ahead, as it is so freshly minted that it represents a full production cycle forward of other key models in BenQ’s range. So let’s see what’s new, why it’s especially smart, and how it allows gamers — and entertainment lovers too — to get that step ahead.
Equipment
BenQ has taken to expanding on its range of pixel-flipping Ultra High Definition projection by means of specialisation. Most of our readers likely have a focus on home entertainment, where BenQ has offered the CinePrime W2700, and above it the W5700 and CinePro X1220H. But only last issue we encountered the TK800M, a 4K projector with special facilities for sports fans, its bright 3000 lumens output paired with dedicated modes for football and sports.
And here we have the TK700STi, labelled as ideal for gamers, enabling them to expand their gameplay beyond a monitor or TV to a genuinely bigscreen experience.
The problem with doing this has traditionally been the amount of time projectors take to process an image. A small delay doesn’t matter when watching a movie, assuming the soundtrack is kept in sync. But delays can mean death to a gamer, quite literally in a first-person shooter, or an action game, or a sports game where timing of a racket swing or the leap to save a penalty shootout is critical. Gamers purchase low-lag monitors
and check TV specs to give their game an edge against competitors, as well as against their console or computer.
So here BenQ, which has plenty of experience in producing such low-lag gaming monitors, proclaims the TK700STi as “the world’s first 4K HDR low input lag gaming projector”. And the good news for both gamers and their potentially non-gaming family and friends is that there seems to have been no great penalty taken in the area of TV and movie performance to achieve such gaming-friendly status.
The TK700STi arrives in a simple suitcase-style box, and once unpackaged it is usefully compact — 31cm wide and just 3.1kg in weight, looking similar to any number of recent BenQ projectors, though a little less curved than the CinePrimes, a little more businesslike.
It promises 3000 lumens brightness, which is plenty for home cinema use and, depending on your screen size, enough to overcome a little ambient light in the environment. There are two HDMI inputs, both 4K-compatible, an RS-232 input and one USB-A slot (for service and power only), plus another HDMI input in a closed-off compartment at the back where you install the supplied QS01 HDMI Android TV dongle. Once networked this dongle brings near-endless apps from Google’s Android TV platform, ready to play direct from the projector under control of the rather nice remote control provided. This upgrades the TK700STi to smart projector status, including the ability to cast from a Chrome browser straight to the stick.
The headline of gaming lag time requires a little elucidation. The main promoted lag time is 16.67 milliseconds, which is made available by selecting the projector’s ‘Game’ modes, which invoke the projector’s ‘Fast’ mode to deliver that 16.67ms lag for 60Hz content regardless of resolution. That’s very impressive for a projector — 16.67ms is the same figure achieved by BenQ’s 1080-resolution gaming projectors, yet here it’s available also with the far larger frames of Ultra High Definition.
Gamers looking for still lower lag should note that the TK700STi can accept 1080p at 120Hz, which would then halve the lag to a surely imperceptible 8.3ms. Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox One S or X can output at 120Hz frame rates, as can PCs. The best gaming-optimised TVs can go slightly lower in lag still, and gaming monitors even further down, but then you’d be losing the joy of wallsized gaming from a projector. The TK700Sti can even accept 1080p at 240Hz, should PC gamers have a graphics card so capable, and this would drop the BenQ’s lag to just 4ms.
Within the three Game modes that make use of the projector’s Fast mode, there is differentiation between key genres of gaming. So there’s an FPS mode for first-person shooter games, which enhances detail in order to reveal enemies hidden in shadows, and there’s an RPG (role-playing) mode which delivers BenQ’s “as directors intended” CinematicColor, in this case extending to 96% of the Rec.709 colour gamut available from HDTV and Blu-ray. Thirdly there’s SPG (for sports games), which provides “true colours” for flesh-tones. The company also makes claims for different sound priorities with each Game mode, to which we’ll return later.
Beyond gaming, or for games which don’t require rapid reactions, there are plenty of other viewing modes on offer, including HDR10 and HDR Game modes. HDR10 mode was engaged automatically whenever we fed it HDR material from UHD Blu-ray.
There’s still a 3D mode available here, should you have 3D movies and a player capable of delivering them. You’ll need to budget for glasses, as these are optional extras.
The fact that BenQ notes the possibility of Full-HD input at 240Hz is interesting. This is a 4K projector which uses Texas Instruments’ DLP technology, a micromirror-flipping solution which has a 1920 × 1080 array of micromirrors which address the screen four times per frame to achieve UHD (consumer 4K) resolution of 3840 × 2160. Colours are handled by an eight-segment spinning colour wheel changing the source light from the DMD into red, green, blue and white (and repeat). We guessed that the 240Hz input capability might indicate that this projector uses the new DLP471TE digital micromirror device from TI, rather than the DLP470TE we’ve seen in all such projectors reviewed so far, and BenQ Australia confirmed this, another indication that this new projector is a full design cycle ahead of models such as the W2700; this new DMD was released only in September 2020. That puts the projection technology here 18 months ahead of those using the older DMD.
Performance
Though small enough to bring out on spec and re-situate when required, the TK700STi will benefit from a permanent site, whether ceiling or benched, able to gain from more carefully calculated positioning and ease of permanent cabling, both for other sources plugged in and potentially for audio signals coming out.
Indeed positioning is all the more critical for gamers wishing to minimise their lag. While you can correct off-axis screen geometry using keystone correction (this
can be cleverly automatic, indeed, for vertical keystone adjustment), this has a penalty beyond the usual compromise in resolution it requires. “When using Fast Mode,” says the manual, “please set Keystone and Overscan to 0 in order to minimize response time.”
These things require pre-processing of every frame, and that’ll slow you down.
Happily it’s not hard to set up the TK700STi accurately, especially with the built-in test pattern that’s available. Get your surface level — or use the adjustable feet if need be — and have your projector perfectly perpendicular to the screen. If the projector is benched, then the bottom of the screen will begin a few centimetres above projector height (12.5cm for a 100-inch screen); if ceiling-mounted the screen top will be similarly offset a few centimetres below the projector height. And the TK700Sti is impressively short-throw, so that for our 100-inch screen its 1.2× zoom lever allowed positioning with the projector’s front edge between 199cm and 239cm from the screen. The manual indicates the projector as being optimised for screen sizes from 60 inches up to an impressive 200 inches.
Focus uses the larger of the two manual adjustment rings above the lens, and is an easy set-and-forget procedure.
We started our watching by perusing the entertainment options now built in thanks to that Android stick neatly hidden in the back of the projector. This allows access to the Google play app store with its near-endless entertainment apps available to install — Disney+, Prime, Stan, Binge, Kanopy (no BritBox), and all five catch-up apps are included.
So that’s a lot of content available right there on the projector, and it’s all controlled effectively from the remote control (though the projector menus themselves proved a bit sticky, often requiring a wait of a few seconds each time we entered a sub-menu).
The one glaring omission on the Android dongle is Netflix, though to its credit BenQ is very upfront about this, using large type on its website rather than hiding it away in smallprint. “Netflix only supports specific authorized devices and is not natively available on BenQ smart home projectors”, it says, before going on to suggest you call up Netflix on a Chrome browser and then cast it to the Android dongle. This puts a few limitations on it, and brings your home network doubly into play. We tried this from both a Chromebook and a MacBook Pro and it worked pretty well, with regular little glitches but no obvious image degradation other than a presumed 1080p maximum.
But really, there are so many ways to watch Netflix these days! Some other plugged-in component — your gaming console, PC or Blu-ray player — may well deliver full-quality Netflix streaming easily enough anyway.
Certainly we were enjoying the image performance of the TK700Sti from its native apps. Colours were a notable strength, even straight from the box, with vibrant greens and reds, a zingy delivery of the difficult violet of jacaranda trees, yet also maintaining accurate and realistic skin tones. Blacks won’t match those of a TV, especially a front-emissive one, and are of course highly affected by any light in the room, but they proved deep enough during night-time viewing to make the BenQ’s colours pop.
From Disney+ the swathes of dark background on the stage of Hamilton were nicely graduated to reveal details of costume patterns even of those waiting in darkened wings. From 4K Blu-ray the value of DLP’s genuine 4K delivery was made evident on the fine recent 4K remasters of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, where the extraordinary detail and textures of costumes and props alike now shine as never before. While we had neither an Xbox One or PS5 console to hand, we confirmed the projector’s ability to accept 1080/120Hz from a PC, and ran a little blistering Battlefield 3 at this revealing rate.
Not a bad word on the images themselves then, but we were also watching carefully for motion judder. Texas Instruments’ 0.47-inch DLP chip accepts all manner of input, but outputs only at 60 frames per second (or, as we’ve seen with gaming, 120Hz and 240Hz). But not at 50 frames per second, nor at 24 frames per second. Australia is a 50Hz country; our free-to-air is 50Hz, much of our catch-up is 50Hz (though some is still 25Hz). Even in a 60Hz market (e.g. Texas, Taiwan), nearly every movie runs at 24 frames per second, and if displayed at 60Hz will have uneven frame distribution, leading to potential judder. Conversion from 50 to 60 frames per second can be even more severe.
Motion processing can attempt to tame this, but this particular BenQ projector doesn’t use any, with no menus for its variation. Normally we’d say that might not be a bad thing, as recent years have seen directors and film stars begging consumers to turn off their motion processing if they want to experience a film as the director intended (the ‘Film-maker’ and similar modes now found on TVs basically do just that), and we often prefer it that way. But no motion processing combined with 60Hz-only output leaves you prey to judder.
Yet we saw very little of it. It was not to be expected when we played the 2017 Twin Peaks season on Blu-ray, as this arrived at 1080/60Hz, and the pans over pine trees were smooth, even the wildly spiralling zigzag carpet patterns were held in check. We had already been watching plenty of 24Hz movies, but paid close attention to the 4K Blu-ray remaster of The Return of the King, with its wide sweeps of New Zealand landscapes and virtually-added Edoras and Gondor cities, which should have shown up 24-to-60Hz conversion — but smoothly they ran, with nothing to distract. We loaded BBC Blu-ray documentaries in 1080p/50, and whether jungle pans from David Attenborough or magnificent sweeps across India by Michael Wood, it was only on an occasional zoom or vertical pan that any judder was visible, and given that even the rolling credits ran smoothly up the screen, what we saw was likely cinematographic in origin. This smooth performance remained the case even when we put the projector into Game modes.
The only place judder was prevalent was 50Hz material viewed from the Android stick — SBS or ABC catch-up shows showed strong evidence of the 50-to-60Hz stuttering we’d been expecting. But then we suspect the Android stick itself is limited to 60Hz, so we should blame that, because if could pass the native stream to the BenQ, the projector might be able to fix it up, as it had other sources.
On the whole, then, somehow the TK700STi overcame our fears of judder. We asked BenQ’s opinion on this, and they replied “It is just the scaler that’s doing the job.” Well, nice job!
Finally we ran Stephen Dawson’s 4K test card, which displays individual pixel lines of colour separated by individual lines of white. This showed that the DLP technology was successfully delivering genuine Ultra High Definition resolution, with the individual pixel lines discernable, if slightly smudged into the gaps. This is just as we’ve seen before from DLP470TE-based devices, so the new DMD chip would seem to match performance in that regard, if not actually improving on it.
Audio
Audio, meanwhile, requires a little thought, especially when using the Android dongle.
There are three ways to listen. You can use the BenQ’s built-in speaker, just the one, in mono, firing from the left side, with 5W of unspecified power. We really couldn’t recommend this for entertainment; it’s simply not entertaining. Bass drops off rapidly below 110Hz, which rather takes the impact out of
“Colours were a notable strength, even straight from the box, with vibrant greens and reds, a zingy delivery of the difficult violet of jacaranda trees...”
movie soundtracks. There’s limited volume available, and the audio quality is simply not a match for the huge and beautiful visuals. So we’d say to keep the internal speaker only for emergencies and ad hoc use.
Your second option for high-quality sound is the analogue minijack audio output. That means running an additional cable back to your sound system, and this will be stereo only, of course. We also found the minijack output to be noisy, emitting strange swooshy bursts of noise when we used the remote to move around the Android interface, though such noise was quickly drowned out once a soundtrack was running. The sound itself, played through a high-quality system, was perfectly serviceable, though congesting at times of high density. This output is also fixed, so can’t be controlled from the BenQ’s volume control, though you’d likely have a separate control for whatever you’ve plugged its output into. You can also just about use it for headphones, though their impedance will entirely govern volume level unless you have active headphones where the active circuit can be used in cabled mode, as is the case with, say, the Yamaha wireless/cabled noise-cancellers reviewed last issue.
The third option for audio is to use the HDMI 2 input, which is ARC-enabled, so in theory the projector should send the audio from other inputs down an HDMI 2connected cable to an external receiver or soundbar. But neither a soundbar nor a receiver with which we tried this were able to get sound from the Android stick this way, though BenQ tells us this should be possible. We could, however, do so from the HDMI 1 input, which is where you’d plug in your games console. But this too is limited to stereo only. BenQ confirmed there is no
5.1 passthrough available here.
So if you’re after the low latency of this projector for gaming, you cannot also enjoy surround sound. Nor can you enjoy surround of any kind for entertainment played from the Android stick. The more conventional connection might be to plug your games console into an AV receiver, then out again to the projector, but then latency will suffer, that extra HDMI chain introducing additional delay. While many people don’t care about surround, those with bigscreen projectors are among those more likely to consider it, and gamers too — surround in gaming can give FPS in particular a great advantage. If you can hear accurately where that sniper fire is coming from, especially if it’s behind you, this may save the day even more effectively than a couple fewer milliseconds of latency.
Indeed we noted that in its Games modes, BenQ mentions sound tweaking for each option, with the FPS mode noted in the manual to “provide surrounding sound to hear the distant footsteps and gunshot and recognize their directions”. Since they’re not going to be tweaking the HDMI audio, we asked BenQ if this was some bold effort at pseudo-surround from the projector’s own, er, mono speaker?
BenQ’s Taiwan head office was kind enough to acknowledge the point, saying that they meant that the built-in speaker enhances the sound from the surroundings — sound from the environment (gunshots, footsteps and other ambient sounds) in which the character is present, and does not refer to actual surround sound. But it will most certainly not help you “recognise their directions”.
It’s hard not to conclude that if projector companies are going to start building video sources like Android TV into the projectors themselves, they need to pay increasing attention to audio, with a surround-capable digital output as a pre-requisite. HDMI eARC would allow Atmos 4K soundtracks to be extracted from UHD Blu-ray movies played on a PS5, as well as delivering gaming surround — the Xbox can run a number of games in Atmos, notably Call Of Duty Black Ops: Cold War. An optical fallback output would at least allow 5.1.
Talking of sound, the TK700Sti emits a constant but not overly distracting whirr; this is tempered significantly by switching to Eco mode, but then so is the brightness. You don’t notice the whirr once you’re playing something, though it carries on for a remarkably long time after you turn it off. Lamp life is quoted as 4000 hours in Normal mode, 8000 in SmartEco (which doesn’t dim things), 10,000 in Eco and 15,000 in LampSave mode.
Conclusion
The Android dongle here adds a swathe of built-in entertainment options, though audio playback from that is a challenge, and surround sound impossible. The TK700Sti projector itself, meanwhile, delivers what BenQ does best — rich colours, genuine pixel-shifted UHD resolution and easy set-up — here enhanced for gamers with low-latency delivery for a stupendously ‘wow’ bigscreen delivery of 4K gaming.