Packed with features, delivering excellent performance, and priced reasonably, the BenQ W4000i home theatre projector amply justifies the effort of creating a dedicated cinema room in your home. Forget measuring image size in inches – here we measure in metres. The BenQ W4000i can throw a 5080mm (that’s five metres!) image while still maintaining its 4K HDR compliance and HDR10+ support.
This uses an LED light source, so no bulbs to worry about replacing, and peak brightness is 3200 ANSI lumens. Combine this with extremely accurate colour – the projector equivalent of local dimming – and a good range of inputs, and it all adds up to a very impressive bit of high-end home cinema kit.
There’s even Android TV on board, so for the home cinema enthusiast the only question is whether to choose the BenQ W4000i or spend twice as much on a laser projector.
Review: BenQ W4000i home theatre projector review
| Australian website | BenQ |
| Price | $4999 |
| Warranty | 2 years |
| Other | Read other BenQ articles on GadgetGuy |
First impressions
The BenQ W4000i is a DLP projector, which uses a Texas Instruments digital micromirror device (DMD) and four LEDs to fling an image at the wall (or ideally, a screen). Yes, it’s not a laser-based system, and neither is it short-throw. Instead this is a highly refined “traditional” projector that you can position at the back of the room on a bench or hanging from the ceiling.
BenQ’s emphasis on “True 4K” is a little perturbing, since the 0.66” DMD in the W4000i has a native resolution of 2716 x 1528 and uses a two-phase pixel-shifting system that moves the DMD back and forth (at 120Hz) to double the pixels being projected. The result is a 4K image, albeit one created on the fly. Can you tell the difference between this and a projector that has a native 4K light engine? Yes: The BenQ W4000i is about half the price.
Once past the 4K shenanigans, the W4000i gets its chance to shine. It’s an HDR-PRO projector, which means support for HDR10+ content, and various other decals on the handsome black casing promise superior colour accuracy.
Set up
Set up is traditional for a DLP device. Position the projector at the back of the viewing room, then use the mechanical controls on the unit itself to get the image more or less centred on the screen or section of wall you’re using.
That means adjusting the 1.3x mechanical zoom and focus – there’s also a 60% vertical adjustment, and 15% horizontal. Other tweaks, done via the remote, include keystone adjustment, though since this is a digital setting, it can affect the final image. For a projector like this, it’s worth fiddling with physical placement to get it just right. For most owners, this will be a permanent installation, and probably in a dedicated cinema room too.
The nature of the BenQ W4000i home theatre projector does require a dark room to perform at its best. Purchasing an ambient light-rejecting (ALR) screen and investing in some black-out curtains might make it an okay choice for a general lounge room, but really, it’s designed for home cinema.
Specifications
BenQ pushes the colour accuracy of the W4000i as a major selling point, and promises the unit covers 100% of the DCI-P3 and Rec.709 colour spaces (it comes with a calibration report in the box to prove it!).
This is obviously important to dedicated cinema buffs, who will mostly use their W4000i to watch Blu-ray movies in Filmmaker Mode, which combines the projector’s various technologies, including 24P playback, CinematicColor, and a “local contrast enhancer algorithm”.
That last feature is something we don’t often see on projectors, and is similar to an LED TV’s local dimming system. According to BenQ, the image is split into 1000 zones, and each zone is analysed and has its gamma tweaked for greater image depth and intensity. That’s on top of the HDR10+ support and Enhanced Tone Mapping (caps theirs), all working together in the name of giving you as close to an LED TV experience as you can get on a projector.
And it works, although if you’re changing up from an OLED TV you’ll immediately notice that BenQ’s “Dynamic Black” does have a tinge of charcoal grey to it. But just a tinge, this really is very impressive contrast for a projector.
Technical specifications
| Projection System | DLP |
| Native Resolution | 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) Resolution |
| Brightness (ANSI Lumens) | 3200 ANSI Lumens |
| Contrast Ratio (FOFO) | 2,000,000:1 (w/ Dynamic Black) |
| Display Colour | 30 Bits (1.07 Billion Colors) |
| Color Gamut | 100% DCI-P3 (WCG On) |
| Light Source | 4LED |
| Lens | F/# 1.8 – 2.25 mm, f 17.02 (Wide)~22.21(Tele) |
| Aspect Ratio | Native 16:9 (4 Selectable Aspect Ratios) |
| Throw Ratio | 1.15 – 1.50 (100″ @ 2.5m) |
| Image Size (Clear Focus / Maximum) | 60–200″ / 300″ |
| Zoom Ratio | 1.3x |
| Len Shift | Vertical 0%-60% (@ H 0%)Horizontal ±15% Max. (@ V 20.9%) |
| Keystone | 2D, Auto Vertical & Manual Horizontal ± 30° |
| Built-in Speaker | 5W x 1 (treVolo Chamber Speaker) |
| Audible Noise(Normal/Economic Mode) | 32 / 28 dBA |
| Dimensions (WHD) mm | 420.5 x135 x 312 mm |
| Weight | 6.6 kg |
| Resolution Support | VGA (640 x 480) to 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) |
| Horizontal Frequency | 15K-135KHz |
| Vertical Scan Rate | 23-240Hz |
| HDTV Compatibility | 720p 50/60Hz, 1080i 50/60Hz, 1080p 24/25/30/50/60/120/240Hz, 2160p 24/25/30/60Hz |
Inputs and outputs
Other home cinema specs of note include two HDMI inputs, both of which support HDCP 2.2 for playing protected content such as from the aforementioned Blu-ray discs. Other signs this is meant for a permanent install are the RS-232 port and 12V trigger, for custom theatre-room setups, as well as a LAN port.
Unusually, the BenQ W4000i home theatre projector also comes with an Android TV dongle. Or is it Google Chromecast? No, Android TV, it says on the box. It’s like a Chromecast, and gives the projector the ability to natively stream the usual range of apps (including Netflix, YouTube et al), but the way it integrates into the projector is kind of weird.
You’ll need to unscrew a panel on the back of the unit to remove a cover, then arrange the Android TV dongle inside the space provided and plug one end into the dedicated HDMI port, and connect the other end via a USB cable. It’s presumably done this way so users can upgrade their Android TV dongle in the future (with whatever magic Google thinks up next) without having to replace the projector.
Performance
Comparing purely apples with apples, or in this case DLP projectors with DLP projectors, the BenQ W4000i is easily one of the best you can get right now. In a properly dark room, against a suitable projection surface, it gives colour, brightness, and contrast that’s almost TV-like in its intensity, and at massive image sizes.
But the W4000i does demand a home cinema setup, and won’t integrate easily into a multi-purpose space like the average living room. Even streetlights at night will add just a bit too much ambient glow, if you don’t have blackout curtains. Basically, for those of us not blessed with windowless cinema rooms, finding the perfect spot takes a while…. But the results are worth it.
On test
In my testing, I was able to give the projector the darkness it craved, and the results were impressive. On Blu-ray, I reached for the now-famous scene from Planet Earth II where baby iguanas must run the gauntlet across an open field while being chased by dozens of snakes – and sure enough it felt all the more intense on a three-metre screen.
It’s a good scene for contrast because most of the background is shades of grey and brown, and the explosive movement of the lizard tests any display. Safe to say, the W4000i’s contrast capabilities helped pick out the glint of evil/hunger in every snake’s eye and the grim look of determination on the faces of those poor iguanas. And the crisp details on the rocks and the harsh shadows looked as good as, I can only assume, Sir David Attenborough would want them to.
After the existential horror of snakes vs iguanas, it was time to revisit the classics of my youth. Blu-ray editions of The Goonies, Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future (part one) played big and bold, and while film grain is visible in some of these, that’s part of the charm of an ’80s movie, right?
The competition
Comparing the W4000i to an OLED TV or a laser projector isn’t really fair, but it’s important to be aware that both those technologies will give superior “inky blackness” and image depth, albeit at a cost. In the case of the TV, the cost is a maximum image size of around 85 inches, and with the laser projector the cost is, well, the cost! With the same amount of colour accuracy and focus on a cinema experience as the BenQ W4000i has, a laser projector will cost anything from $8000–10,000 making it a whole other level of investment.
Still, BenQ has gone to some lengths to make the W4000i as useable as possible, with that Android TV dongle, and there’s even a speaker built-in! Though there’s an argument that if you don’t have an extensive BD collection, or don’t really care about very precise colour accuracy, then the W4000i is overkill.
Who is the BenQ W4000i home theatre projector for?
This is an excellently designed DLP/LED projector that performs at the top of that technology’s capabilities. The colour accuracy plus the contrast enhancement gubbins make it an ideal choice for the person who has a dedicated media room, but maybe isn’t up for spending family sedan money on a true “home cinema”. It seems odd to call a top-tier, full-featured, $5000 projector a “budget” option, but when it comes to serious home theatre… it kinda is.
If you don’t have a properly dark room, or wall space to project an image at least three to four metres, then you’ll be better off with a short-throw projector or just a really big TV. When you move into the new place with the proper media room, that’s when the BenQ W4000i will get its chance to shine.
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