Epson EH-TW3200 review

The Epson EH-TW3200 may cost under a £1,000 but this LCD Full HD 1080p model is packed full of features.

One of the most important is lens shift. Two wheels sit on the projector to let you align the image on your screen vertically and horizontally without having to turn to digital correction. With two HDMI, composite, component, S-Video and VGA inputs, you can hook up pretty much any kind of AV kit you may have.

The remote control is a work of class, with backlit keys. It’s comfortable to hold and use. The menu system is standard for Epson, too. All the picture mode and colour configuration options are in the Image menu, which lets you tweak everything from colour temperature to skin tones and, in the advanced sub-menu, the individual balance of each colour on the RGB or RGBCMY scale. The Settings menu contains useful features like sleep mode settings and a pin code child lock.

There are five different default picture modes. Living Room, Natural and Cinema all look great, with natural, well balanced colours and convincing flesh tones. Living Room is the best option if you’ll only have partial darkness, as it’s the brightest of the three, while Natural has the most subtle and realistic colouring. This is particularly visible on delicately shaded areas such as the petals of flowers. Cinema mode is your best bet if you want to make the most of black and white movies: although dark areas lacked the subtle shading we’ve seen from some projectors, our monochrome video files were very watchable, especially compared to similarly priced DLP projectors, which are plagued by the rainbow effect.

Although its 1,800 lumens brightness suggests that this is a model that can be used under living room lighting, in truth it can get a bit overwhelmed and dark scenes can lose their detail. Turning lights down or shutting the curtains makes a massive difference, and darker scenes retain their detail,

This projector has a little more motion blur than most LCD models, but although this was a visible in our most challenging moving image test, which bounces a still image around the screen, it had minimal impact on the our test footage of a football match and other fast-paced scenes.

A bit of blur and a picture that does best in at least partial darkness aren’t enough to detract from the fact that this is an excellent LCD projector that costs less than £1,000. Although it’s not a good choice if you want to a projector that you can use in a well lit room, it’s a great choice for a cinema enthusiast on a tighter budget. Epson’s EH-TW3200 is our Best Buy, only really bettered by the fantastic and more expensive Panasonic’s PT-AE4000E.