The W1800 also seems to take great care about the way it maps HDR sources to its inherent capabilities. There’s precious little clipping of detail in bright peaks, for instance, and colours look authentic rather than strained (even when it comes to notoriously difficult skin tones). The projector also sensibly uses HDR’s expanded light range more to deliver subtler light differences than to push the extremes. The BenQ W1800 can do up to 15,000 hours in its lamp save mode, but only 8,000 in the most balanced Smart Eco mode and just 4,000 when it’s set to normal. After that, you’re looking at a pricey lamp replacement. The W1800’s excellent colour and light control plays its part, too, in making pictures exceptionally sharp and detailed for such an affordable projector. In fact, its pictures really do look like 4K, as billed. Certainly denser, more nuanced and, as a result, more three-dimensional than you would see with a regular 1080p DLP projector. This really matters, of course, when you’re talking about images as massive as those the W1800 can provide.

Images live up to BenQ's home cinema promises, achieving a cinematic feel that humbles a good number of more expensive projectors. Digital rotation adjustment improves projection flexibility, even on uneven platforms. More placement options help free up valuable space for active games or comfortable lounging. Switch to standard dynamic range (SDR) content and the BenQ W2700 continues to impress, although it does fall behind the Optoma slightly here in terms of peak brightness and range of colour. My preferred picture mode here is the W2700’s Cinema mode, which provides the best combination of brightness and depth of colour. True colors awaken feelings of sorrow, joy, romance and thrills by preserving the original image. BenQ home cinema projectors embody our belief to convey the truest color and impart the deepest emotions to the viewer. Led by our THX and ISF dual-certified engineers, the BenQ CinematicColor™ technology team delivers full Rec. 709 HDTV-standard coverage for perfect color consistency. See the Wonders of CinematicColor™ Unlike other HDR projectors with biased color temperature and oversaturated greens and reds, BenQ Auto HDR Natural Color Rendition technology unleashes breathtaking 4K HDR visuals with perfectly lifelike color performance automatically tuned to reflect nature.The W1800 claims a promising contrast ratio of 10,000:1, and a brightness of 2,000 Lumens. This latter figure might not sound like much compared with the daylight-challenging laser projectors we've auditioned lately, but experience suggests that at the W1800's level of the market, brightness around this level is often conducive to a solid contrast performance. True colours awaken feelings of sorrow, joy, romance and thrills by preserving the original image. BenQ home cinema projectors embody our belief to convey the truest colour and impart the deepest emotions to the viewer. Led by our THX and ISF dual-certified engineers, the BenQ CinematicColor™ technology team delivers full Rec. 709 HDTV-standard coverage for perfect colour consistency. See the Wonders of CinematicColor™ This is crucial, as it means that you don’t feel like you’ve suddenly had your connection with what you’re watching broken every time a film shifts from a bright scene to a dark one. Such consistency is massively important for any projector that’s serious about home cinema. As well as minimising input lag, the Game and HDR Game modes are designed to bring out shadow detail in darker areas without reducing contrast, and this actually seems to work. Whether venturing underground in Elden Ring or investigating the deepest, scariest spaces of The Witch Queen, I was able to see my way forward and approach enemies with ease. This BenQ includes support for HDR10 and HLG. HDR10 is widely used on UHD gaming consoles from Sony and Microsoft. HLG (Hybrid Log Gamma HDR) is a broadcast and user generated standard format that is seen as the standard for transmitting 4K signals.

The claimed 4K support is controversial in the sense that, as with all such affordable ‘4K’ projectors that use DLP optical technology, the BenQ W1800 doesn’t actually carry a native 3840x2160 number of digital mirror devices (DMDs) on its 0.47-inch chip. Instead it draws on the amazing speed with which DLP’s mirrors can respond to get them to deliver essentially multiple pixels of picture information within a single frame. With support for HDR10 and HLG and, rather unusually, the ability to reproduce the DCI-P3 colour gamut (95% according to the manufacturer’s claims), the BenQ W2700 brings technologies traditionally only available in projectors costing many thousands of pounds to a much more affordable level. For reference, most projectors at this sort of price can only do Rec.709, which is roughly equivalent to sRGB. Stunning 4K UHD 3840×2160 resolution is four times the pixel count of 1080p Full HD. With 8.3 million distinct pixels for each frame, W1800 minimizes blur and displays crisp, clear video. Additionally, the new generation 0.47” single-DMD DLP technology showcases sleek, modern design to complement your viewing space.

Stunning 4K UHD 3840x2160 resolution is four times the pixel count of 1080p Full HD. With 8.3 million distinct pixels for each frame, W1800 minimizes blur and displays crisp, clear video. Additionally, the new generation 0.47” single-DMD DLP technology showcases sleek, modern design to complement your viewing space. Get comfortable and enjoy movies at home, the way filmmakers intended: out-of-the-box color accuracy, cinematic colors, and grand pictures on BenQ Home Projectors. Surround yourself in your own home theater.

Stunning 4K UHD 3840x2160 resolution is four times the pixel count of 1080p Full HD. With 8.3 million distinct pixels for each frame, W1800 minimizes blur and displays crisp, clear video. Additionally, the new generation 0.47” single-DMD DLP technology showcases sleek, modern design to complement your viewing space. Hyper-Realistic Video Quality with HDR

Key Features of BenQ W1800 Projector

While many BenQ projectors sport CinematicColor technology, the W1800 adds another video-facing feature that we haven’t seen from a BenQ projector before: Filmmaker Mode. Developed by the Ultra HD Alliance, an industry body comprising a broad church of content creators and consumer electronics companies, the Filmmaker Mode picture preset is designed to deliver images that resemble as closely as a device can manage the video standards used by the creative industries when they master their content. Filmmaker mode is quite common on TVs now, but it’s still rare in the projector world. What’s more, potentially controversially, the W1800 actually defaults to the Filmmaker Mode whenever it receives an HDR image, and then won’t let you switch to any other preset. Filmmaker Mode preserves motion cadence, cinematic color, dynamic range, and brightness that directors intended for the big screen. BenQ 4K home projectors support the filmmakers’ desire for home viewers to relive majestic scenes and tender moments the way they were meant to be seen. Factory Calibrated Out-of-the-Box Color Accuracy