Does the BenQ HT4550i Live Up to the Hype?

[Music] today we're going to be taking a look at the BenQ ht4550i also known as a w4000i i released another video where I showed my first impressions of this particular projector in different lighting situations so make sure to check that out if you're interested in seeing that so this is a 4K pixel shifting projector using the Texas Instruments 0.65 DMD chip I would say this is a short throw projector not to be confused with an ultra short throw which is meant to be placed below the screen all that means is that you can have a projected image of over 100 inches with about 10 feet distance from the screen itself this is a 3200 Lumen projector covering 100 of DCI P3 color space so this is also using a 4 LED light engine as opposed to the bulb on the previous models and they claim that with normal usage you can get up to 10 plus years of use out of this so jumping right into it the first thing I would say is just the colors out of this are very accurate and that's what I would expect from BenQ they've always made very accurate projectors this one even comes with a factory calibration report and that is pretty amazing I could tell right out of the box that it was accurate because I also do lots of color calibration I make these videos and I know what my skin looks like I know what the color shirt this is and so when I compare it to what I see on the screen it is very accurate the monitor that I use is color calibrated and I can say that it is very close to what I see on the BenQ it's amazing that it's nearly indistinguishable aside from the fact that this is the 32 inch screen and the other one is 120. now the thing that I noticed is that the black levels on this are better than what I had before but still not quite what I was hoping for or wishing for I mean maybe my expectations were unrealistic but yeah they're still not perfect black and that's what you get at this price point I'm hoping that one day they're gonna crack the code and be able to provide perfect black levels at these prices I should also mention that the starting price at this current time is 299 now what it lacks in perfect black levels it does make up for in brightness this is a bright projector I know it says 3000 lumens and it just looks very bright I don't know if it has to do with the light engine type but when I compare this to my TK 850 that I usually use that also has about 3000 lumens it's not even close so I don't know if my bulb is going out on that one but I don't remember the TK 850 ever looking this bright if you don't have it in a perfectly light controlled situation even though I do watch in my theater sometimes I have the lights on I still want to be able to watch something this does have a dynamic contrast mode which can be set to off low medium or high and I can see why it would look better on some situations but it is less accurate so it depends on the type of content that you're watching and what you prefer I usually keep it off but it does help to enhance the contrast when it's on now the weak point in most projectors that I've seen is HDR just because they don't get really bright enough to be able to provide that pop that you'd expect from HDR and on many projectors I prefer to watch SDR card content to HDR but on these benq's the HDR tone mapping is excellent and they also give you options to choose whether you want the lighter or darker aspects of the HDR scene so depending on the movie if you're watching a dark movie you may want to brighten it up to be able to see more detail and if you're watching a bright movie you may want to turn that down to preserve some of the darker scenes so I've used projectors before where I had to use a specific Blu-ray player to provide the tone mapping and in my opinion the BenQ provides better tone mapping than that system ever did this also has a dedicated 24p mode which reduces some of the judder if you're watching a movie that is in 24p and what I notice is when I switch to that and watch some 24p content everything just looked much smoother almost like it wasn't 24p it was kind of a weird sensation but I liked it it still had that 24p cinematic motion blur that you expect but when something was there it didn't look stuttery like that it looked nice and smooth as far as sharpness I know this is a pixel shifting projector but BenQ I don't know what they're doing if they're using in good lenses but I have no problem with the sharpness I've used these as an extension of my computer system where I use them as a monitor and that really can bring out the flaws because if you're looking at text if it's not sharp it's pretty easy to tell and these do a great job with that connecting my computer to the projector also shows latency issues and with this one I noticed that it was very low latency compared to my old projector they have a fast mode that turns off some of the features and they claim that the latency is 17.9 milliseconds at 4K 60 compared to 86.5 milliseconds on my TK 850 that is a huge Improvement they even have a mode where you can change it to 1080p 240 hertz and that reduces the latency down to 8.7 milliseconds speaking of speed one welcome change is that it is much faster to turn on and turn off compared to my previous projector it has to do with them not having to warm up and cool down the bulb and there was a significant difference that I showed in my first impressions video also the noise is signif efficiently reduced on this compared to the TK 850 and if you put it on eco mode it's almost silent now I use Smart Eco which is a little bit louder but not to the point where it's distracting by any means and of course if I'm playing a movie and there's sound coming out I totally forget the projectors even on alright so this is my regular talking voice and the mic is right about here about arm's length distance alright so first the tk850 go ahead and Power It Up so let's go ahead and try the ht4550 they do have a streaming stick that's included that runs on Android TV they actually have a cool way to install it which hides the streaming stick in the back I think that they should have had that pre-installed but it's cool that they provide it if you're gonna buy a projector at this price point I really recommend getting a better streaming device like an Nvidia Shield or Apple TV 4K it's just a better experience they're faster and more capable than these are now from an installation standpoint this has more lens shift than the previous TK 850 and I found that very useful because it does have different mounting points on the top so I just mounted this using the existing Mount I didn't have to move anything up there and I was able to use the lens shift to just move it left and right and up and down and I was able to get it framed perfectly very easy and very useful of course you're going to need to use the zoom and focus to get that centered perfectly but it was very easy this has a ton of ports in the back you can take a look here and if you're going to use this in a professional situation they do have options for that such as trigger switches and serial ports now this does support HDR 10 which is welcome and it also offers 3D support if you're into that sort of thing I don't watch too many movies in 3D but I may try it out once in a while when it comes to some of the more technical stuff I refer to my friend Phil Jones at projectedreviews.com let me get him on here and he can talk to you more about some of those technical details so here we have Phil Phil there's a lot of things I can't do when it comes to projector reviews and I know that you run projectorreviews.com and so I'm kind of curious about what you found regarding measurements you know I'm a measurement guy what did you find big thing that matters on these type of projectors is is color accuracy and a lot of times when you look at projectors especially projectors that are under like the 5 000 price range they aren't very accurate um and a lot of times they don't meet their brightness specifications the thing that so of course we always we always test it we're nice enough to have I have a client meet measuring device and all the little tricks you need for Cowman to measure it so the first thing we did was we measured its color gamut so they say they can do 100 DCI P3 it can because it has a cinema filter so this little thing when you switch between modes you can actually hear it click in and click out what that does is that expands the color gamut to 100 DC ip3 and DCI P3 is the color that's used in most HDR content but when you do that it's almost like putting sunglasses on something so you're going to lose about 25 to 30 of your brightness me personally I thought the colors were vibrant enough when watching HDR not to use it and if you're watching SDR material there is enough color range in that to even turn it on so I have this so if I was looking at HDR I would probably say yes it'd be on paper it looks cool to hit 100 but I think 80 percent with 30 more brightness is going to give you a better HDR picture but you have the choice I'm not here to tell you what's right you have the choice to do that um the next thing is how accurate is you know we hear like you hear all the the Deltas and all that stuff um we always measure for Delta error Delta error is if this is the red it's supposed to be and this is the red that you're getting if it's too far off you will be able to differentiate with the Creator and tenant for you to see from what the projector is producing and the standard is if it's if the Delta era is less than three it's pretty much impossible except for the most hardcore colorist to see a difference binq says that their projectors come pre-calibrated so of course you want to test it and we were quite surprised and it's better picture modes it was a Delta of around two or less which is pretty much outstanding when it comes to um normally we test that's RGB grayscale the balance between red green and blue so a lot of times I can take a DLP projector and it would take me a half an hour to an hour to get it to be what this print projector was out of the box so that was actually surprising so that's that's a great value because somebody who's buying this particular projector they might not have it in their budget to go and have somebody professionally calibrated so that's a big value added in my opinion oh yeah absolutely I mean if you're buying a a big Sony or a big JVC the picture is already great but you're going to spend you already spent 20 grand on a thing why wouldn't you spend another 500 to a thousand bucks to dial it in but many of us are working our way up and the BenQ has when you talk about Black Level color accuracy good HDR out of the box is very good can you make it better absolutely it took me I mean it was great out of the box it took another half an hour it was even better um the one thing that I noticed that it could be better is there's two things we check RGB balance that's the grayscale they call that grayscale so it's from black to white so it's different steps like you see that grayscale pattern um you want that to be gray gray gray gray gray all the way up to White then the next one is color tracking you know there's dots there's a certain intensity of red blue green magenta Scion yellow and you wanted to hit the pop the spots exact this one it's a little over saturated so the reds are redder than what they should be and the blues are Bluer Than what they should be and they're a little shifted not enough for you to notice but a little bit for most people it's okay if an overly intense red just looks cool to most people but if you're if you're a geek you're you can you can quickly dial that down and it's not like the skin tone there's just going to be like all over the place and totally unrealistic it's that part no no it's more like you read of your baseball cap is going to be a little more intense than what it should be okay um but I will tell you that the stuff like in your range like skin tones and stuff it's pretty good okay and so uh that's what I found also and I remember I called you when I first got it I'm like how come these these uh LEDs it says that it's you know 3000 lumens or you know whatever it is but it seems so much brighter than my bulb based ones I'm I almost thought are these going out why does it seem so much brighter even though the number may not say that it's super bright what is that about yeah it has to do with the light source this has been a debate so the way that we normally test the projector for brightness is ANSI lumens um the what that is is there's they they test certain positions on the screen and they take an average so that way there's like a little a pattern and you're supposed to check all the different patterns in your average it most reviewers just don't do it exactly like that we just want to get an estimate about if it's on target so we'll we'll take some different measurements in different areas and come up with that average and if they say 3200 and we get 3250 or 3150 we know the average the um the manufacturer is telling it's pretty much telling the truth if we get 2 000 that's a problem right well well the difference with an LED projector is the the way your eyes respond to it is a little different than what the measurement will be and they so a lot of Manufacturers try to rate it as led lumens so you'll hear some actually say well this is 4 000 LED lumens 3 000 answer right so uh but benqa said it's a 3200 anti-lumen but because it's using using an LED light source you perceive it as as brighter if you ever have a camera like this and you have LED lights behind you the camera really loves them and the colors are really intense more intense right that scene that's how the camera sensor responds to LED light where your eyes do the same thing well thanks a lot Phil that was a ton of info and for you guys who want more make sure to check out Phil's site projectorreviews.com and you can look at all the stuff there right Phil exactly the review is still um in in production but it'll be up in probably by the middle of what is this June a couple weeks a week ago from now so there are definitely a lot of things that are just better suited for a website like looking at the different charts that you were talking about and so make sure to check out his site Phil thank you again dude no problem anytime so in conclusion I am really enjoying this projector they did send this out free for me to review so I have to say that but what I can say is I also have a bunch of BenQ projectors that I purchased or have reviewed in the past the first one I've ever purchased was the HT 2050 and I still have it and I'm still amazed by how bright and accurate that is but it's a 1080p projector so a little bit older I also have the ht3550 which this one is a direct replacement for I think I know that they still have the ht3560i which is a newer version bulb based my issue with the ht3550 is it didn't seem to be bright enough it just there wasn't enough pop so I ended up using the TK 850 in my theater even though the color accuracy wasn't as good but it just was brighter so it was worth the trade-off for me this projector is brighter and more accurate than the TK 850 so it's really the best of both worlds in my living room space which is not light controlled I have the v750 I Ultra short throw and that thing is amazing that's using a laser light source and yeah I would say as far as brightness oh man they're very close but of course they're very different that one's an ultra short throw and this is a ceiling mounted projector between the two though I would say that the image quality is comparable brightness is comparable but I would say that this one is more accurate don't get me wrong the v7050 is no slouch it's just hard to compare the two directly because one is in a light controlled situation with a specific type of screen and the other one is in the living room with tons of light coming in so different purposes so I've recently reviewed the gp500 which also uses the four LED light source and it's a little bit different and that one's meant to be portable but the main thing I noticed is that one wasn't as bright with 1500 lumens and the color accuracy wasn't as accurate but still some of the same qualities as far as brighter than you would expect it 1500 lumens on that one doesn't seem like 1500 lumens seem brighter than that but the most obvious difference that I see is that the black levels on the GPI 500 aren't as good as what I'm seeing here on the 4550 so I'm happy to recommend this I'll leave a link to this in the description if you're interested and if you have any questions leave them in the comments below and I'll do my best to answer them anyway that's it take care bye-bye

Channel: Joe N Tell

Views: 8,072

Keywords: home audio, home theater, benq projector, benq ht4550i, benq ht4550i review, benq w4000i, benq w4000i review, benq ht4550i vs tk850, benq ht4550i vs v7050i, benq ht4550i vs ht3550i, best projector under $3000

Id: xYgZV_mzE0E

Length: 17min 4sec (1024 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2023