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.

Fortunately, the EH-TW450 doesn’t let the side down when it comes to image quality. An HDMI input lets you easily plug in an HD video source, such as a Blu-ray player or games console, while a VGA input is there for a PC.

In this day and age a projector that doesn’t have a 1080p Full HD image might not sound ideal, but the EH-TW450 goes some way to disproving that. Watching HD on Freeview and Blu-ray movies we were pleased with the high level of detail we saw. It might not quite be up there with the best Full HD models, but when you think of the price it’s impressive.

The high brightness of this projector helps create bright and vivid colours. Watching the chase scene in Casino Royale we were impressed by the full level of detail and rich colours. Motion was nice and fluid, with the fast-paced opening fight sequence of Casino Royale rendered with no judder or other problems.

Depending on the ambient light, the brightness can go against the projector, causing blacks to look a bit grey; however, switching the projector to ECO mode drops the lamp brightness and makes blacks look darker.

ECO mode has the advantage that the bulb’s life is extended from 3,000 hours to 4,000 hours, reducing running costs from 9p per hour to just 6p per hour. This is pretty good going and if you’re only using this model occasionally, you’re unlikely to need to change the bulb anytime soon.

The remote control lets you adjust the projector’s image settings using the intuitive menu. All of the buttons are replicated on top of the projector, too, so you can get by if you don’t have the remote to hand.

Epson provides a series of default viewing settings linked to content types (Game, Theatre, etc), but you’re as well off adjusting these to suit the ambient lighting. For example, it’s good to have one profile for use during the day when there’s a lot of light, and another for night-time viewing when it’s much darker.

If you’re looking for an HD projector for occasional use, the TW-EH450 is a great budget option. Its brightness means that you can use it indoors under any lighting conditions, making this a very flexible model. However, its throw ratio means that the projector really has to be placed on a coffee table or other surface close to the projection surface otherwise you’ll get an image that’s simply too big to deal with – a smaller image to start with and a larger zoom control would have been ideal. That aside, if you’re on a tight budget and want a do-all projector this is a decent choice.