Benq W1070 HD projector & Sapphire 106" screen review

eddiem74 wrote: »

I tested out the calibration settings from the AvForums review and must say I think they really improved the picture or at least did not affect it badly. Really enjoying it now...:)

Have you a link to this? What settings did you adjust? Does this involve unlocking the expert calibration menu?

Nelbert wrote: »

How far is your W1070 from the screen? Ceiling mounted?

This is a very appropriate question.
I have mine mounted 9 feet/275cm (plus or minus an inch approx) from the screen. There is a range of about 1 metre or so in which you can mount it (for a given screen size), because there is a 1.5x zoom lens on it. There is a table of measurements published somewhere. I'll see if I can find it.

I'll get into more detail and the other measurements of the screen and aspect ratios of films later.

I bought the projector and screen from Richer Sounds as I like to give them the business if I can, and they were willing to match Amazon's price. They are always keen to sell with their 5-year warranty bundled, but you don't have to get it. In the end I decided to let them sell me the extended warranty, even though it won't cover the bulb of course. I suppose I felt I was spending so much that I might as well spend a little more for peace of mind (and thinking that if I didn't get it Murphy's law might kick in) also I don't mind so much letting them have a bit of extra profit margin.

I'll post up the exact prices a later, but from memory, the projector was £700 and the screen around £250. I bought a 10 metre Cablesson HDMI cable on Amazon for about £18 and it works fine. I don't believe I would have noticed any difference if I spent £100 on this cable, which I could have!

Anyway, here are some pics. You might spot straight away that my circumstances were particularly difficult, as I have a sloping (not flat) ceiling and the area in which I mounted the screen is not actually tall enough to allow me to pull down the screen to its full length. I'll write about how this affects my setup a bit later, but you might be able to see from the pics.
The short story is that for true cinematic films that have an anamorphic widescreen format, it is not a problem.

This is the projector screen I bought from Richer sounds:
Sapphire SWS240WSF-ASR2
It was £199.95 + £50 delivery and it arrived quickly and well packaged. It is a big item to have delivered. The long box it comes in is necessarily longer than the case of the screen itself.

Three things I wanted to know before I bought it were:
If it had a black backing to it (so it would be sure of blocking out light when mounted over a window). It does, and it does not let any light through it (in either direction).

If it could be mounted from the ceiling or from a wall. The brackets supplied with it do allow both mounting options and it is a very good system. You affix the brackets and then clip the screen casing into them. It works well.



The dimensions of the case (so I would know if it would fit between two walls).
The case is 250.5cm wide (but I would allow another mm or two. You could be sure that it would fit into a space of 251cm. Don't forget that you will need to leave room for your speakers either side of it too. The width of my cinema room is 274.5cm (approx 9feet) which is quite narrow.

The speakers are Logitech computer type speakers, similar to the type you get with surround sound systems, and much narrower than typical "bookshelf" type hifi speakers. You would think that the sound would be tinny, but with a powered subwoofer, the right sounds go to the right channels and your ear puts the sounds all back together in a way that sounds crisp and detailed. If anyone wants to know more about my sound setup, I'll go into more detail about it.

The width of the screen is 243.1cm (almost 95 and 3/4 inches) including the black border. The black border is 4.5cm on each side, therefore the viewable width is 234.1cm or just a fraction over 92 inches wide.

The full height of the screen is approximately 142cm or roughly 56 inches, including the weight bar (which is a little less wide than the case, measuring 247.7 or just over 97.5 inches) at the bottom of the screen (but not including the handle at the bottom centre of the screen).
The viewable height of the screen (excluding the black border at the top and bottom) is 132cm or roughly 52 inches.

The square root of the sum of the squares of the viewable width (234.1cm or 92") and height (132cm or 52") give a diagonal viewable screen measurement of just a shade under 106" which is close enough for me, given that my measurements of the viewable area were with a cheap tape measure.

To put all those figures more simply at a glance:

The red arrow on the right is a rough measurement of the total height needed for the height of the case including allowing for the mounting brackets, screen, and weight bar down to the bottom of the handle.

This is the screen I considered buying before I bought the Sapphire one from Richer Sounds:
Duronic EPS106/169 which is significantly cheaper than the Sapphire one at £79.99 and yet seems to have an electric motor included, although remote control is optional.
I have no need for an electric motor or remote, although perhaps this is something that would interest other people.

I decided not to order this one, partially because of the price being so low I thought it could not be all that great, and secondly because I thought it might be very expensive or a lot of hassle to get it posted to Ireland.

This may not have ben a very rational decision though, and although there are a few reviews of it on Amazon.co.uk, if anyone does get this, I'd be interested to hear your opinion of it - especially of course if you have seen the Sapphire screen and can compare both.

One thing I read in the Amazon reviews for this screen, which prepared me for the Sapphire was the plastic smell that you get from it. At first it seems subtle but after a while it seems overpowering. Like the reviewer on Amazon wrote though, it does dissipate after a day or two. It's not an offensive smell though. I think it's the same smell you'd get if you put your nose up to the plastic of a beach ball. My guess is this is the same smell you will get initially with any projector screen.

I can think of two negatives to the BenQ W1070, however both are very likely to also apply to the Optoma HD25e.

The first, and the big one for me, is the noise from the unit. I don't know if all of the noise is from the cooling fan or if the colour wheel is something that spins and also creates noise. Whatever is the source of the noise, I hear it and I do find it intrusive at times. A part of the problem for me is that I am sitting almost under the projector itself. Others may have less of a problem if their room and seating position is different.

Of course, I have the sound system up loud for the cinema experience, and others will surely say that it only becomes noticeable at quiet parts of a film and possibly dismiss it as not much of an issue. It is something that I find a big drawback with the technology though and I would upgrade in the future if I thought it would be possible to have a projector that did not generate heat that needed to be cooled by a fan.

I remember reading reviews of both the various Optoma models (which were about £100 dearer than the BenQ) and comparing it to the BenQ for noise rating. On paper, the Optoma had a fan noise decibel level a little less than the BenQ, but a few reviews said that in reality the Optoma was louder.

I found this review on Amazon.com for the Optoma HD25e which is interesting because it talks about the confusion of Optoma model numbers and revisions. I know some have different completely model numbers depending on whether they come with the active 3D glasses or not. Other model numbers (like the addition of the "e" to the HD25 model number) are variations based on lamp type.

The second drawback is this phenomenon known as the "rainbow effect", where you see a momentary fringe of a rainbow at the edge of areas of high contrast when you move your eyes quickly around the screen.
For me, it's only something that occasionally occurs when I look away from the screen at a time when a scene has these areas of high contrast. I don't think it's a huge issue. Apparently some people see the effect more easily than others.

This phenomenon is something that will happen with any projector that uses the Texas Instruments DLP chipset, which both the BenQ and Optoma do.

When I was making my decision between the two, I went for the BenQ because it had so many very positive reviews, and because I read a few reviews which questioned the reliability of the Optoma. The deciding factor though was that there didn't seem to be much to separate the two in terms of what they offered, and the BenQ has a vertical lens shift which was useful in my setup (I'll explain more later if anyone's interested in what that does).

As they seemed to be more or less equal in reviews, apart from some saying that the Optoma had deeper blacks and colours, and the BenQ being about £100 cheaper, I went for that. Although I haven't seen the Optoma in real life to compare properly, from seeing screenshots, it seems to me that the Optoma oversaturates colours and does not show skintones as naturally.

I see from this review for the Epson EH-TW5910 that it seems to use a totally different technology. It says it uses a 3-LCD technology instead of DLP. It still evidently uses an incandescent lamp to shine light through though, so still there is a cooling fan with the associated noise. The review says that the richer colours and brightness levels are immediately apparent. I don't know, but perhaps the extra £200 for this model could be worth it to eliminate the possibility of the rainbow effect.

I'm not sure if there could be any downside though to this 3-LCD technology. I wonder would this projector be as good as the others with regard to smooth horizontal motion. Anyone got any experience with this one? (I've noticed the BenQ is pretty fluid with horizontal motion - much better than either of my LCD and LED backlit TVs.)

Don't be worrying about whether you're worrying about first world problems. We can't be carrying around a burden of guilt all the time about everything.
Anyway ...

I think if you have the room (space) for it, go for as big as you can, because as you have probably already noticed with televisions, when you first get them they seem big, but soon become just normal.

Describe more about your particular set of circumstances, and why you think the smaller screen might do to help make a more informed decision.

By the way, this projector has been on sale for nearly £600 recently, so keep an eye on its price for the best time to buy (I paid closer to £700 for it as far as I remember).
[edit] In fact it's exactly £600 on Amazon.co.uk right now.

I still love this projector and the whole cinema setup, including sound.
I bought four Sainsonic 3D glasses for it which seem to work well with it. It was around £70 for 4 pairs as far as I remember. Will get the details if required.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

I don't think that the quality of the projected image will be any different between the 106" and 120" screen. I think there is an upper limit to the projected image size which is listed in the specs somewhere (which is likely a lot larger than 120" diagonal).
EDIT: According to the specs (see specifications tab here), the projected image range can be between 40" and 235", although this projection calculator website suggests that picture brightness will suffer beyond a 15 foot throw distance, which effectively gives a maximum (diagonal) screen size of about 160" before possible loss of picture quality.

I would be a little worried about the screen being in close proximity to a stove fire and what effect it might have on the screen. Perhaps it might cause it to sag or warp or deform over time in some way. A stove heater also tends to generate a fair amount of dust, so it may not be an ideal environment for the projector. However, these things may not be significant factors, but something to keep in mind. I read before that people buy special cleaning brushes that are used with DSLR cameras to clean the lens of their projectors.

I've only got the glasses recently. They seem to work fine (in the sense that they don't appear to drop out of synchronisation). However, I haven't watched a film from start to end yet with the 3D glasses, but I've watched more than an hour, which satisfies me that they do work properly.

I don't know if sport will be enhanced much, purely because it is (unless something dodgy is going on) not scripted, and therefore 3D effects are not planned throughout the action. However, there could be times when some camera angle combined with a certain direction of the ball or player could have some quite awesome effect.
EDIT: Forgot to say that I think sport in general will likely display very well with this projector. A lot of sport can be horizontally scrolling, and this can show up the deficiencies in a lot of TVs. I have played Forza Horizons on the Xbox via this projector and it looks fantastic and there have never been any issues with the picture not refreshing quickly enough. In fact I have been very impressed at how smoothly the game plays on this. So, I expect live sport would appear smooth as well (such as the travel of the football across the screen).

You can also tell the projector to simulate 3D from a 2D source and I find that this can work surprisingly well, but it depends on the film itself (animated stuff seems to be enhanced most convincingly) . You can also adjust the depths of the 3D "layers" so there's lots to experiment with in regard to finding some kind of sweet-spot that looks best for the particular source input.

These are the glasses I got on Amazon.co.uk
4 Pack of SainSonic® Zodiac 904 Series 144Hz Rechargeable 3D DLP-Link Projector Universal Active Shutter Glasses

As for buying the projector on amazon.de, it looks like you'd save €40 or so from there, so unless anyone knows of any significant downsides of buying from the German website, why not get from there I suppose.

EDIT: regarding the mounts, yes the screen case can slide in them to be adjusted left to right, but ideally you'd want to have the mounts equidistant from either end.

These Logitech Z506 speakers are £59 on Amazon and seem to be the successor to the X-540s. However, they look to be a disimprovement on the X540s because they don't seem to be designed for easy wall mounting, which seriously diminishes their usefulness for a home cinema setup as far as I'm concerned.

For both these speaker sets, there are standard analog 3.5mm jack inputs for front speakers (green) centre speaker (yellow/orange) and surround speakers (black). Your sound card would need to have these corresponding analog outputs.

If you only have the green output on your sound card, you will only get 2-channel stereo. Both the X-540 and the Z506 speakers can simulate surround sound in this case. It's called the matrix button on the X-540. A review on Amazon says that this feature is not able to be switched off on the Z506, so I'm not sure how that would work if you didn't want simulated surround.

With an AV-receiver (multi-channel amplifier), you can output the sound in digital format from your computer via optical (aka Toslink) or HDMI. The amp can then give you much better control over the sound before it's sent to the speakers.

An amp will almost always be designed in such a way that it will have less electrical noise within it than a PC, so will be less susceptible to electrical interference and will produce a better quality sound. It also will give you much more options about how to process the sound.

Of course it also gives you the ability to add many more inputs, such as Blu-ray players, satellite and DTT decoders, games consoles, and whatever else you might want to connect to your audio/visual setup.