Epson EH-TW450 review

If you’re on a fairly tight budget, it’s fairly easy to get a bright projector or an HD projector, but not both together. Well, that is if you don’t go for the Epson EH-TW450.

This 3LCD projector costs just over £600, but has a 720p (1,280×720) resolution and a brightness of 2,500 ANSI lumens. From the specs alone it appears to be the perfect entertainment projector that you can use no matter what the lighting conditions are.

To many extents that’s correct and this projector is incredibly bright. It’s so bright that you can easily project a viewable image under full home lighting, unlike many high-end home cinema projectors where you have to shut the curtains and dim the lights.

We even found that we could use the EH-TW450 during daylight hours without having to shut any curtains. However, this largely depends on whether or not you get direct sunlight, as this projector’s not bright enough to punch through pure daylight.

The EH-TW450 extreme brightness means that this is a model that’s more suited to people who want to whip out a projector for special occasions, such as the football, a gaming session or the occasional movie, rather than having a proper installation. This can be seen by the large throw ratio.

Using it in a living room, we place the projector on the back wall and projected onto the front wall, which was roughly 5m away. However, the screen was so big that side of the image wrapped onto the side wall. There’s a 1.2x zoom lens, but making the picture bigger certainly wouldn’t help. Nor could we place the projector on top of a book shelf, as the lens angles the image upwards.

There’s no lens shift in this model, so you need to get the placement correct. In other words, for most people this means placing the projector on a coffee table in front of where you’re sitting. This should result in a large image for you to watch. For its intended purpose, this is the ideal situation.