Epson EF-21 review: A step up from the budget LED projectors

With the Epson EF-21 projector series, the brand is changing it up. Until now, Epson’s best projectors have been fairly traditional affairs, sticking to the brand’s established 3LCD technology, high-powered lamps and rather businesslike designs. This time, it has combined a laser light source with a 1080p 3LCD setup in the kind of bijou one-box unit we’d normally expect to see from XGIMI, Anker or BenQ.

Thanks to its laser tech, the EF-21 promises 1,000 lumens brightness levels, richer colours and more contrast than your average budget LED beamer, along with built-in audio and streaming. But can this new-school projector hold up to old favourites like the CO-FH02? I’ve been using it extensively over the last week and am ready to deliver my verdict.

Epson EF-21 review: What do you get for the money?

The Epson EF-21 has a list price of £800 but was available on Amazon for £699 at the time of writing. That outlay gets you a compact 1080p projector in a choice of white or ice green finishes, with the only real difference being that the green version costs £100 more.

The laser light source gives you 1,000 ANSI lumens of brightness and should last you for up to 20,000 hours or ten years. Google TV streaming is built in, as is a 5W audio system, and it supports HDR10. With a throw ratio of 1-1.82:1, you can have a 60in image at 1.33m from the screen, or a 100in image from 2.24m. In theory, the EF-21 can go as big as 150in, but you are going to lose some contrast and brightness – and you’ll need a 3.38m throw.

This is a very attractive little projector measuring 197 x 191 x 113mm (WDH). The colour options, curved corners and shortish throw make it a good option for casual coffee table use, though there is a threaded tripod socket should you want it mounted. A tiny adjustable foot at the front gives you some leeway to tilt upwards if you’re sitting the projector low or on the floor.

Connectivity is fairly basic, with a single HDMI 2.0 port, a USB 2.0 Type-A port, a mini-USB port and a 3.5mm headphone socket. Still, that should cover you for a Blu-ray player or console, and you’ll spend the rest of your time streaming through Google TV.

Epson has also launched the EF-22 – a similar compact projector available in navy blue or black. This currently costs £800 and comes with a passive radiator speaker for added bass and an adjustable turntable stand.

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Epson EF-21 review: What does it do well?

It’s very easy to set up and just start watching, partly because Google TV is so adept at this stuff these days, and partly because Epson’s automatic keystone correction and focus adjustment is so good. This isn’t one of those projectors where you can just plonk it down on a surface and point it roughly at the screen, but as long as you have it pointing just about straight on, the software takes care of the rest, and I barely needed to tweak a thing. Meanwhile, Google TV did such a solid job of linking my Google account and installing apps, that I had all my usual streaming services up and running within half an hour of setting up.

Google TV also gives you plenty of choice, with all the major UK streaming and catch-up services ready to go, with the peculiar exception of BBC iPlayer. This was installed but not enabled at start-up, and my attempts to enable it were met with a ‘could not connect’ error message. Otherwise, you get all the benefits of Google’s app store, universal voice search and clean UI. Overall, it’s a great experience.

The key thing, of course, is image quality. With 1,000 ANSI lumens to play with, the EF-21 can deliver sharp and vibrant 1080p video, and even the usual 3LCD problem – grey blacks – isn’t too much of an issue here. With high-bitrate content, you get surprising levels of contrast and detail, to the extent that when watching Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power on Amazon Prime Video or Deadpool vs Wolverine on Disney+, there were times when the presentation was almost 4K good.

With decent source material, you get some lovely rich colours and even a respectable effort at HDR. Even tricky material, like The Northman or The Green Knight, which can trip many LED and laser projectors up, the Epson delivered a highly watchable result. There were no muddy and illegible dark scenes here, just some of the best 1080p pictures I’ve seen from a compact beamer.

This surprised me, as my colorimeter test results were more good than brilliant. In its Vibrant picture mode, the Epson covers 81.5% of the sRGB colour gamut and just 66.1% of DCI-P3. However, I had similar results from the old CO-FH02, which has a brighter 3,000 ANSI lumens light source and still delivered great results. Overall, I’d rather watch the EF-21 than the still excellent XGIMI MoGo 3 Pro, even if the latter offers superior gamut coverage.

Epson EF-21 review: What could it do better?

This isn’t such a great gaming projector. There’s no serious lag or anything like that, but paired with an Xbox Series S or a gaming laptop, I found the colours slightly under-egged and the motion slightly smeary, even on the Vibrant picture setting.

The sound might also be a problem. Epson has tried to give the EF-21 well-balanced and powerful audio, but there’s not a lot of bass at the low end or clarity and detail at the high end. It’s weirdly fine with music, but I sometimes struggled to hear dialogue when watching TV and movies at low to medium volume. It’s fine for casual viewing, but not quite what you want on a blockbuster movie night.

Even with the volume whacked up, there wasn’t a whole lot of presence or punch to the output. You can get around this by connecting to a Bluetooth speaker or soundbar, provided you can find one without much latency, or connecting a speaker or soundbar directly through the headphone output. Plus, if you’re watching solo, a set of Bluetooth headphones works a treat.

Epson EF-21 review: Should you buy it?

The EF-21 fits into a sweet spot between relatively cheap 1080p projectors like the MoGo 3 Pro or CO-FH02 and more expensive 1080p and 4K options like the XGIMI Horizon Ultra and the Anker Nebula Mars 3. It gives you slightly better image quality than the cheapies -plus a slick Google TV experience – at a lower cost than the more capable home cinema projectors. The audio could be better, but that’s about the only thing holding it back.

It’s worth noting that you don’t need to spend a whole lot more to get a brighter 4K projector based on conventional lamp technology, like Epson’s own EH-TW6150 or the Optoma UHD38x. These aren’t as easy to set up and you’ll need separate speakers or a soundbar for audio – and possibly a 4K streaming stick – but you’ll get even better image quality for the money.

Still, you won’t find it in such a compact or attractive package, or with everything you need in a single unit. If that matters to you more than 4K clarity, think seriously about the EF-21.