Epson EH-TW9100 review

Epson has two top-end home cinema projectors: the EH-TW9100, reviewed here, and the EH-TW9100W. The Full HD systems are both 3D ready with an incredibly bright 2,400 lumen lamp, but the TW9100W (£2,900 from www.superfi.co.uk) possesses a wireless HDMI video-streaming system, which should make setup easier. Image quality will be identical, regardless of which model you buy. We’ve reviewed the non-wireless EH-TW9100.

The main unit is best mounted to the ceiling or installed on a shelf as it takes up a considerable amount of floor space. The centrally mounted lens and front-facing heat exhausts will keep the lamp at its working temperature no matter where you fit it, but be aware that you’ll need to be able to reach the focus and zoom rings, along with the horizontal and vertical lens shift dials on top of the unit, because it has no electronic lens adjustment. Having both horizontal and vertical shift on hand helps immensely during setup, and is far more useful than the digital keystone system. It’s there if you must use it, but it impacts picture quality and is best avoided. We had no problem getting the projector aligned correctly and fitting the image to our screen with its 2.1x optical zoom lens.

All the inputs are located at the rear of the projector, with two HDMI ports providing the most up to date connectivity. There’s also VGA, component and composite video connectors, as well as an RS-232 serial port and a 12v trigger output for wiring in a screen motor or other automation system. Epson has neglected to fit the system with any speakers, but most customers will connect it to an amplifier and surround sound speakers rather than rely on less powerful internal speakers for watching sports or films. There are no audio outputs; be aware of this if you have older equipment that doesn’t work with HDMI.

Thankfully, you can control everything using the fully backlit remote control once the system’s installed and adjusted. It’s extremely useful for changing picture modes in the dark, and has buttons for all major functions, including source selection, colour modes and Epson’s Super Resolution upscaling system. Epson’s Super Resolution upscaling seeks to sharpen each standard definition frame independently, so that the projected image doesn’t look as blurred. The onscreen menus are just as easy to navigate and easy to read. They’re sensibly divided into submenus and don’t obscure the entire image. A closer look at the menus revealed plenty of useful calibration tools, including Kelvin-based colour presets, lamp economy settings, gamma settings and brightness, contrast, sharpness and tone sliders.

You also have control over Epson’s auto-iris system, Super Resolution and frame interpolation, as well as the intriguing Correct LCD Align option. This uses a scaling system to adjust the image projected by the blue and red LCD panels, preventing any red or blue ‘bleed’ around the edges of brightly lit objects. Even with the feature enabled, we noticed one or two red colour errors around bright lines and text.

The four 2D picture presets (cinema, living room, dynamic and natural) are all perfectly usable straight away, although we recommend using the natural setting as a starting point for custom calibration as it has a less harsh colour palette that looks much more like reality. Our reference footage looked very impressive, mainly thanks to the excellent contrast, especially if you use the dynamic iris mode. Even the High setting is relatively unobtrusive, producing deep blacks without crushing the shadow detail.

Standard definition DVDs were handled reasonably well, especially with Super Resolution enabled, but naturally the EH-T9100 was at its best playing 1080p Blu-ray discs. Super Resolution even works well here, managing to squeeze extra detail without generating unwanted image or noise artefacts. The one exception is during fast motion, where we noticed some blurring. However, once we’d enabled the Motion Processing system these went away too, as long as we stuck to the Low preset.

We were already impressed with the EH-T9100, but it stood out in terms of 3D picture quality. The three-LCD projection system creates vivid colours that look fantastic, even through a pair of Epson’s active shutter glasses. There was absolutely no noticeable flicker, and the depth effects were superb. You get two pairs of glasses, and additional pairs cost £61 (ELPGS01, from www.amazon.co.uk), so you should take the cost of extra 3D glasses into account if buying the EH-T9100 to watch 3D films with your family. We stuck to the 3D Cinema preset, which produced the richest colours and brightest scenes without losing depth or creating ghosting effects. You can manually alter the depth level, although we immediately noticed crosstalk on anything plus or minus one notch beyond the baseline figure.

The EH-TW9100 is able to reproduce images of stunning quality in both 2D and 3D, has plenty of video inputs and is very easy to set up. Dig a little deeper, however, and there are some shortcomings, such as the oddly designed LCD alignment option and slight colour bleed, but for most people these issues are insignificant and don’t affect picture quality enough to impact enjoyment. If you want to avoid these issues altogether, the more expensive Sony VPL-HW50ES uses LCOS projection and produces equally gorgeous images, but there’s very little not to like here. It’s a fantastic home cinema projector that justifies its place at the top of Epson’s line-up.