BenQ GP10 review

Home cinema projectors don’t come much smaller than the BenQ GP10. Measuring a slim 62x220x177mm and weighing just 1.5kg, this portable DLP projector is easy to carry in or out of the home. The GP10 comes with a carry case, and its internal battery means you only need to bring a plug instead of a bulky power adaptor.

Naturally, the GP10’s small size means it doesn’t have as many inputs as a typical home cinema projector, but BenQ has made great use of the available space. There are HDMI, VGA and composite inputs, an SDHC card reader, a USB port for connecting USB drives or a Wi-Fi dongle, and a mini USB port for projecting over USB or transferring files to the GP10’s internal memory. There are also two 3W stereo speakers if you don’t have a dedicated set of speakers handy.

It’s easy to switch between input devices thanks to its easy-to-use home menu. The projector automatically defaults to the DVD player option when you first turn it on, but you can either use the remote control or the buttons on top of the projector to switch between its different projector modes.

The GP10’s 1,280×800 resolution looked sharp and bright in our test room, and we could use the GP10 comfortably with the lights on. Our test PowerPoint presentation looked great. Colours were vibrant and punchy, and even our high contrast test photos showed lots of clearly defined shadow detail. Of course, images looked better with the lights off, but you won’t have to shroud your room in darkness when you want to use it.

The GP10 has a short throw ratio, so you won’t need to position it too far away from a wall or projection screen to see a large picture. We saw a screen size of 82in from just 7ft away, so the GP10’s perfect for placing on a small coffee table in front of your projection surface. There’s also a height-adjustable foot at the front of the projector to help you get the correct angle.

Sadly, there are only a few options for adjusting the picture. There are five picture modes, including Standard, Cinema, Game, Bright and a customisable User mode. In User mode, you can change the brightness, contrast and colour temperature by using one of the other four modes as a reference, but make sure you remember to save your settings because the GP10 won’t remember them automatically.

This was mildly irritating, but the GP10’s picture mode settings make only the slightest bit of difference to the overall image, so we’d recommend sticking with one of the preset modes. We liked Bright and Standard the best because these produced the most natural colours and had the best contrast levels. Cinema and Game, on the other hand, made the screen appear far too blue and they obscured almost all the detail in dark night scenes, even when we set the contrast to its highest setting. Other image settings include wall colour, aspect ratio, keystone correction and colour space conversion.

In our test Blu-Ray footage, images looked beautifully crisp, but fast-paced action sequences and even mild camera pans juddered. This is to be expected on a projector at this price; we normally only see frame interpolation and smoothing features on high-end models. It certainly didn’t detract from our overall viewing experience and you’d be hard-pushed to notice it in more sedate films.

If you’d rather not plug anything into the GP10, the projector has 2GB of onboard storage for your files. Only around 1.5GB is available to the user, but once transferred we could open our files with ease. Files took a little while to load, but were typically ready to go within five seconds. The projector supports a good range of files, too, including PDF, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, DOC, DOCX office files, JPG and BMP image files, AVI, MKV, DVIX, MPEG video files and MP3, OGG, WAV and AAC audio files.

You can connect a Wi-Fi dongle to the GP10 if you want to project wirelessly from your PC or iOS device, and connecting our laptop was simple. You’ll need to download BenQ’s EZ Qpresenter program and follow the onscreen projector instructions, but once you’ve connected your PC to the projector’s Wi-Fi network and opened Qpresenter, you can choose to mirror or extend your desktop onto your projection surface.

To connect the GP10 to an iOS device, you must download the GP10 QPresenter app. You can then project PDF files, photos, Microsoft Office documents and Apple Pages, Numbers and Keynote files wirelessly and effortlessly.

The GP10’s only minor disappointment is its limited 3D capabilities. The GP10 is 3D-ready, but there’s a catch: it’s only compatible with 3D footage output from your PC. This means it’ll project games that use Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology, for example, but it won’t project 3D Blu-ray videos from a consumer Blu-Ray player or a games console such as the PS3. The GP10 doesn’t come with any 3D glasses, so you’ll have to buy them separately. All that said, it’s unlikely to bother most people buying a budget projector.

The BenQ GP10 has its limitations, but 3D issues aside it’s still a good home cinema projector. There’s plenty of scope for connecting multiple devices and the GP10’s picture quality is good considering its price. It wins a Budget Buy award.