Audio Video News

Cost-conscious home theater enthusiasts still waiting patiently for a projector with a bright image and decent blacks for under a thousand bucks could be celebrating this summer with the release of Epson's latest 1080p entries.

At a broad-ranging fall product preview in New York this week dubbed “The Epson Experience,” the company announced two 1080p-resolution LCD budget projectors that appear to carry an almost shockingly high value quotient. The Home Cinema 2040 and 2045 (shown), priced respectively at an eyebrow-raising $799 and $849, differ only by the 2045’s inclusion of WiDi and Miracast technologies for throwing images from a handheld or laptop to the projector. In common is a 2200 lumen brightness rating, which is in keeping with Epson’s design philosophy of delivering fairly high light output on its theater projectors. To put that number in perspective, JVC’s current DLA-X500 and X700 projectors, favorites among the Sound & Vision staff and other videophiles for their deep blacks, deliver about 1300 lumens. That’s more than enough for dark-room viewing of screens of perhaps 120-inches diagonal or smaller, but challenged to reproduce a punchy image in any kind of real ambient light, even with a pricey specialty screen.

Epson’s flexible “go bright or go home” philosophy by definition calls for some sacrifice in deep blacks and contrast. But what’s notable here is that Epson has mated that 2200-lumen brightness with a newly designed automatic iris that is said to outperform any they’ve offered before in projectors of this price class. An auto-iris is used to shut down the light for dark scenes to deliver deeper blacks, and Epson’s latest design is said to enjoy tighter tolerances among the parts to reduce light leakage and improve contrast ratio to a rated 35,000:1.

While Epson didn’t have a dark-room environment to demo the 2045, I did see it throw an approximately 120-inch diagonal image on a standard white-washed wall—no screen or reflective paint—in what I’d call moderate ambient light emanating mostly from a distance of 20 or so feet behind the projector. A few minutes of watching the animated feature Big Hero 6 left a good impression. It was bright, colorful, and engagingly punchy. I was particularly focused on the shock of dark moptop hair on the young protégé Hiro as he tours his brother’s high-tech research lab. This was a solid looking black that made me want to whisk this piece away into my basement theater to see what it could really do with the lights out. We hope to get sample soon and report back.

Other features of both projectors include the company’s Image Enhancement circuitry (which has only appeared in its higher end projectors to date), an MHL-compliant HDMI port for mounting a Roku stick or Android phone, and a modest built-in speaker to use in a pinch.