Hisense 100L5 Laser TV
The big-screen joys of laser projection with the living room convenience of a TV.
The Hisense 100L5 isn’t exactly your average TV. This much becomes obvious as soon as you clock the fact that it gives you a massive 100-inch screen for less money than many regular
75-inch TVs.
Since it ships in two parts – the projector and the screen – the 100L5 is a bit more of an imposition on your room than a straight 100-inch TV would be. That said, the screen is slimmer than most LCD TVs, while the projector really can sit almost within touching distance of your wall. So there certainly isn’t the usual projection issue whereby the projector has to sit in the middle of your room or near your seating position.
The projector is fairly large, as usual for an ultra-short throw design. There needs to be some room, after all, for light to bounce around inside the unit before emerging through the slit on the projector’s top edge. It wears its size well, though, thanks to a silver and grey two-tone design and rear-mounted, felt-covered speaker section. Given that the projector sits right up against your wall, this rear section is actually the part of the projector that’s most visible from your seating position.
Although Hisense isn’t adverse to using Android TV or Roku TV smart platforms on its TVs, for the Laser TV it’s opted to use its own VIDAA system. On the upside, VIDAA works impressively slickly. You can navigate around its simple, icon-driven menus with no sluggishness, and apps boot and update unobtrusively.
Deliberately starting our tests by running the 100L5 in regular living room conditions rather than the sort of fully blacked out room usually needed for projector testing, first impressions of the Hisense 100L5’s pictures are seriously striking.
The projector’s high, laserinspired brightness, combined with the gain of the screen and the short distance the projector’s light needs to travel before it reaches the screen, results in a picture you really can still enjoy even when there’s a significant amount of ambient light in your room. Bright images still look punchy and vibrant, with surprisingly fullblooded colours and a level of eye-catching intensity that projectors just aren’t supposed to be able to manage in a light room.
So rich and bright are the lightest parts of the 100L5’s pictures that they manage to make dark areas look convincing too. This sense that the 100L5 can deliver good black levels is, it turns out, something of an illusion created by the system’s combination of high brightness, vibrant colours and the lightrejecting qualities of the screen. But as illusions go, it’s a good one.
The Hisense 100L5 doesn’t quite have the black levels to win over the high-end home cinema market. However, by delivering a 100-inch picture that’s genuinely watchable in a bright room for vastly less than a normal 100-inch LCD TV would cost, it still has the potential to seriously shake up the king-sized TV world. John Archer