BenQ W1350 review

Compact projectors are great for temporary home cinema setups, where a lack of space or money means you can’t install a permanent screen or projector mount in a dedicated projector room. The Full HD BenQ W1350 is one effective solution to this problem, with tiny 330x120x247mm chassis and a 3.7kg weight that means it’s easy to set up and tuck away again without any bother.

The W1350 has practicality that more than matches its portability. The throw ratio of 1.39-2.09 means you get a sizable 65in image from just two metres away, and with 30 degrees of horizontal and vertical keystone adjustment, a generous amount of vertical lens shift as well as zoom and focus knobs so you can place the projector at any reasonable angle and still get a straight picture. There two adjustable feet at the rear and a single, retractable foot at the front, too, so if you place your W1350 on a table you’ll be able to make some fine adjustments.

Image quality is impressive. The default colour mode is so good, in fact, there’s very little reason for anybody but the most hardcore home cinema enthusiasts to delve into the picture adjustment menus. If that’s your bag, you’ll find individual hue, grain and saturation settings for red, blue, green, cyan, magenta and yellow colours as well as contrast, brightness and gamma settings. The only adjustment we felt compelled to make was a slight bump in contrast; even in a dark room we felt dark greys in very dark movie scenes were just a little crushed.Some models of this projector are supplied with a wireless projection kit and are around £200-£250 more expensive depending on the retailer. We were not supplied with this hardware, however, so cannot comment on its reliability.

The menu system is a little cluttered and it’s sometimes hard to find the setting you’re looking for, but the backlit remote control is responsive and has plenty of shortcut buttons on it for ease of access for more commonly used settings.

The projector uses a single-chip DLP projection system with a bright 2,500 ANSI Lumen lamp. The spinning colour wheel inside the projector has six segments (two lots of RGB) for better colour coverage, and we have to say this has been a success. Colours in bright photographs are vibrant while skin tones in movies are natural. The Full HD resolution means there’s a huge amount of detail visible in Blu-Ray movies and games. Some single-chip DLP projectors suffer from a “rainbow” effect when watching fast-moving images or when your eyes pan across the screen, but we didn’t notice this in our testing.

What we did notice, however, was a fair amount of judder on objects moving horizontally and vertically across the screen. Projectors starting from around £1,000 will have built-in frame interpolation technology, but the W1350 has no such option. Juddering was very noticeable in the opening scene of Star Trek: Into Darkness, and this continued through the rest of the movie.There is a wide range of inputs on the back of the projector including a VGA port, two HDMI connectors (one of which can connect to MHL-enabled smartphones and tablets), a set of component connectors and an composite video port, too. There’s also a pair of 3.5mm audio input and output jacks, and a pair of left and right composite audio connectors.

Also supplied in the box is a pair of active shutter 3D glasses. Active shutter glasses rapidly switch each lens from transparent to opaque, keeping in sync with the projected image and creating an authentic-looking 3D image. When you activate 3D and don the glasses, a lot of image vibrancy is lost, but if you’re a fan of 3D, the effect is pretty convincing. There’s a little bit of crosstalk on objects that are in the immediate foreground, such as the undergrowth in Avatar, but it’s barely noticeable and didn’t detract from the experience too much. It’s a shame two pairs aren’t supplied, although when you consider a single pair retails for more than £80, it’s understandable.Playing games in both 2D and 3D is great, and we measured input lag at between 27ms and 33ms, which is perfectly fine for non-competitive gaming. The juddering issues we have with movies is still present, but less noticeable in faster-paced games and didn’t harm our enjoyment of Injustice: Gods Among Men.

Projectors often miss the mark with their built-in speakers, and while it’s understandable on kit that’s designed to be mounted and permanently plugged into a home cinema system, portable projectors needs as few cables as possible to avoid tangles and trips. The 10W speaker built into the BenQ W1350 is very good indeed, providing crisp and clear speech, music and sound effects. You’ll never manage to recreate the bass presence of a home 5.1 home cinema system with this projector, but it does a mighty fine job all by itself.  This means you can save money by not having to buy external speakers.

While the projector gets very hot to the touch, the internal fan never becomes overbearingly loud. Noise is rated at 34dB, and while there’s a definite constant whooshing sound, turning the sound up easily overcomes this.

The BenQ W1350 is a decent compact projector with great speakers and excellent active shutter 3D. However, it sits in a slightly awkward price middleground that means paying £200 more (which, admittedly, is a fair whack more) will get you the Optoma HD50, which has frame interpolation technology for less judder. Meanwhile, paying £100 less gets you the Optoma GT1080, which also uses a single-chip DLP system and benefits from slightly brighter lamp, although its colours aren’t quite as strong and it doesn’t have the useful lens shift or horizontal keystoning of the BenQ. If you need something versatile and have the budget, then, the BenQ W1350 is still a good choice.