Epson EH-TW7200 review

Epson’s latest three-LCD home cinema projector has just about everything you could want from a mid-range model, including a high 1,920×1,080 resolution, active 3D support, and vertical and horizontal lens shift. Even better, its 2,000 lumens of light output means you shouldn’t need to draw the curtains every time you want to watch a film.

With a substantial 466x 395mm footprint, the EH-TW7200 is a large projector, and almost twice the size as some competing models, so you may struggle to fit it on a coffee table or bookshelf. The large lens is centrally mounted, and exhaust fins on either side of the EH-TW7200 expel hot air, which is ideal if you’ll be putting it on a shelf or in a cupboard, as you won’t have to worry about accidentally obstructing the flow of air.

All the inputs are located at the back of the projector. The EH-TW7200 has two HDMI inputs, as well as S-video, component and composite video for legacy equipment, a USB service port, remote trigger and an RS-232 port for linking the projector to a home automation. Like many other home cinema projectors, the EH-TW7200 doesn’t have integrated speakers. That means you’ll need to wire it through an AV amplifier in order to hear sound because there are no audio outputs or pass-through connections on the main unit.

Although the EH-TW7200 is a high-end projector, it doesn’t include any kind of electronic lens control; instead, you have to adjust zoom, focus and lens shift using the manual dials on the projector itself. Thanks to a 2.1x optical zoom, getting the EH-TW7200 to fill our projector screen was a painless process. All three dials were firm and stayed in place as soon as we let go, so you won’t constantly need to readjust focus. There’s an option for digital keystone in the settings menus, but it should be avoided if at all possible because it degrades picture quality compared to placing the projector directly perpendicular to your wall or screen.

Apart from lens control, everything can be controlled using Epson’s rather chunky remote control. It’s backlit, which is great for making adjustments once you’ve settled down to watch a film, and has buttons to switch between inputs or enable the more advanced image processing modes quickly. There are also buttons to navigate the onscreen menu on the projector itself, in case you happen to misplace the remote.

Epson’s three-LCD projection system won’t suffer from the rainbow effect that plagues DLP projectors, and it also produces the same bright images regardless of content, so colours look just as bright as whites. The EH-TW7200 is rated at 2,000 lumens, which is bright enough to use in moderate daylight, but naturally you’ll get the best results when watching in the dark.

IMAGE QUALITY

Out of the box, the EH-TW7200 produced startlingly good Full HD images that were exceptionally vibrant bright with colours, but at the same time looked natural even before we’d started adjusting the presets. Darker scenes were a real highlight, and showed an abundance of detail not normally present in projectors at this price. We typically see slightly washed out images and a lack of shadow detail, but there was none of that here. Even with calibration, images will never be as black as on a plasma TV, or even some of the best LED models, but almost nothing gets lost as long as you’ve dimmed the lights.

The claimed contrast ratio of 120,000:1 is achieved with a dynamic iris system, which you can toggle off if you notice it adjusting during darker scenes. For the most part we couldn’t spot it on the normal setting and it works silently, so we left it enabled to get a slight visual boost.

There are only four 2D picture presets: Dynamic, Living room, Natural and Cinema. Two more, 3D Dynamic and 3D Cinema, are dedicated to 3D content, but there’s no user mode for more advanced calibration. We opted to use the Cinema preset as a base line, which thankfully doesn’t lock you out of the more advanced image processing options such as auto iris, colour temperature, gamma, RGBCMY colour and skin tone adjustment. There’s also a noise reduction slider and a Super-resolution toggle which intelligently sharpens the picture to give the impression of added detail; we didn’t need to adjust sharpness or enable noise reduction as images looked clean and precise to begin with, although we did appreciate the illusion of added detail with Super-resolution enabled. It works without generating unwanted artefacts or exaggerating film grain.

3D video is just as impressive, thanks to an almost complete absence of crosstalk. Even once we’d donned the active shutter glasses colours were rich and images were bright, albeit slightly dimmer than when watching in 2D mode. The only noticeable downside was the handling of fast panning, which causes the image to judder. There’s no frame creation mode to smooth this over, although it is really only present in certain scenes. One pair of active 3D glasses is included in the box, but each new additional pair will cost around £65 (ELPGS03 from www.savastore.com).

In its Eco mode, which is activated out of the box, the EH-TW7200 is very quiet; we could happily sit a few feet away and enjoy a film without it becoming a distraction. However, we found it necessary to disable Eco mode to squeeze every last bit of light for 3D video, upon which the noise increased significantly. It’s not deafening, but easily noticeable and rather irritating.

CONCLUSION

At around £1,800, the EH-TW7200 is in an interesting position between entry-level DLP projectors and much more expensive high-end models. You would need to spend almost £1,000 more to get a model with advanced features like frame creation or electronic lens control, while the slightly cheaper DLP models can’t compete in terms of picture quality. If your home cinema budget is less than £2,000, this is one of the best projectors that money will buy.