Benq X1300i
Great for gamers, solid for movie fans
From its fancy cubic design to its built-in Trevolo sound system and surprisingly well-developed focus on video gaming, the X1300i does everything it can to stand out from today’s crowded projector shelves.
For the X1300i’s asking price you would expect to get a 4K projector, but while the X1300i is capable of taking in 4K signals, natively it is only a Full HD projector, and many Full HD projectors can be had for much less. Benq has a few potent excuses for the X1300i’s price, though. Namely its serious built-in audio system, strong support for HDR, impressively bright lighting engine, built-in Android smart system, and unique gaming features.
A stylish mix of white and glassy black, with orange front-edge trim, pretty much screams ‘fun’ at you. The lens sits in a recessed area in the top left quadrant of the large front face, with essentially the whole bottom half of the projector given over to the built-in stereo audio system. Basic zoom and focus rings are accessed through a window at the projector’s side.
Justifying its price
The X1300i is built around a single-chip, Full HD DLP optical system that claims 3000 lumens of peak light output and coverage of up to 98 per cent of the Rec 709 colour system. Alongside that high brightness is a colossal claimed contrast ratio of 500,000:1. The X1300i can also play HDR video in the HDR10 format, and uses LED lighting to deliver a whopping claimed lamp life of up to 30,000 hours.
The built-in sound system is designed by Italian hi-fi brand Trevolo. It comprises two speakers driven by 10W of amplification, and has added processing in the form of Bongiovi DPS. Rather than living on a prayer, though, this audio processor is designed to ‘add depth, clarity, bass definition, presence and enhance stereo field imaging’, with a special focus on gaming applications.
Gaming support is extensive, with two HDMIS that handle 4K HDR gaming feeds up to 60Hz or 1080p feeds to 120Hz. Benq claims a 120Hz lag of only just over 8ms – a good result by projector standards. As you would hope of a projector aimed at fairly casual use, the X1300i is easy to set up. Simple screw-down legs help angle the image onto a screen or wall, and the zoom adjustment offers 1.2x optical zoom. There is no optical image shifting, so you will likely depend on keystone correction to get the edges of your image parallel.
“Even the richest tones appear with enough tonal subtleties to give images a good sense of depth and realism”
Depth and realism
Remarkable brightness helps game graphics look immersive, engaging and vibrant in a dark room setting, yet still enjoyable and watchable even in a fairly bright room. Being so usable in a variety of lighting environments is a great feature for a relatively ‘casual’ projector.
Colours really pop, too – but the colour punch doesn’t come at the expense of colour detail. Even the richest tones appear with enough tonal subtleties to give images a good sense of depth and realism. Images look impressively sharp, too. So much so that it is easy to forget at times that this is only a Full HD projector, despite being able to take in 4K sources.
Contrast is the weakest link compared with a TV. Dark scenes look rather grey and flat, though while the X1300i’s black level performance isn’t great, it still brings out lots of shadow detail in dark game areas.
Projectors that excel at gaming don’t always turn their hand successfully to movies, and in particular, dark film scenes look quite greyed over and washed out versus the best dedicated home cinema projectors. The brightest parts of HDR film images can look a little washed out too.
That’s not to say the X1300i is a total bust with films. Its brightness and punchy colours still give HDR sources a spring in their step that most similarly affordable projectors can’t manage. It also again gets maximum value out of its Full HD resolution, giving movies a crisp, polished finish and a forensic sense of detail that helps good-quality transfers survive the journey up to really large screen sizes.
Again, the X1300i’s Trevolo sound system is slightly more effective with games than films. The Benq’s different Game presets (RPG, First Person Shooter and Sports) really do deliver markedly different sound profiles genuinely well suited to those genres, and are delivered with more intelligence, noticeable difference and conviction by the Trevolo speaker arrangement than they would be by pretty much any price-rival projector.
The Trevolo audio sounds strangely unconvincing with Dolby Atmos soundtracks. Bass extension is limited, impact sounds lack, well, impact, and the sound doesn’t cast clear enough of the projector’s bodywork to sound suitably connected with the pictures.
While serious home cinema fans may have pause for thought, for gamers and more casual movie fans, the X1300i’s bright, punchy and sharp pictures and built-in audio talents make it a capable and fun projector.