BenQ TK705i review

BenQ is one of the busiest projector brands around, producing models of all shapes, sizes and prices.

The TK705i successfully finds another little twist to add to the current projector range by combining a solid picture performance with an aggressive price, built-in smarts and arguably BenQ’s cutest design to date.

Though as we’ll see, offering so much for its price tag hasn’t been a completely compromise-free process.

Price

At £1199 / $1799 / AU$2199, the TK705i sits towards the lower end of the lifestyle projector market – yet it has some promising specifications and features to its name. These include built-in Google smarts, 3000 lumens of claimed peak brightness, 4K HDR playback and an integrated sound system.

Key rivals in this space are the Award-winning Hisense M2 Pro, and the super-stylish Epson EF-72.

Design

The TK705i is the latest example of a rapidly expanding trend for roughly cubic projectors. Its take on this trend, though, is actually one of the most attractive to date.

Apparently inspired by dappled sunlight filtering through layered leaves (yes, really), the TK705i features a bluish-grey fabric front and sides finished in a nicely contrasting hard plastic grille with some interesting spots of solid smooth grey finish over clusters of the grille holes.

Rounded corners soften the projector’s presence to complete the living room-friendly feel, and you can attach its strikingly compact form to a mounting foot if you want to add rotating and tilting flexibility to its design charms. It’s even possible to use the projector inverted and tilted on a shelf if such positioning suits your room layout.

At which point we’re feeling pretty confident that our inadequate words really aren’t doing the TK705i’s prettiness justice, and refer you to the photographs accompanying this review.

The TK705i ships with a full-sized remote control featuring large, clearly labelled buttons in a sensible layout that makes its key mic, home screen, auto picture adaptation, YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video and Live TV buttons suitably prominent with an eye-catching white backing.

Features

The TK705i’s eye-catching design is built around a DLP optical system illuminated by LED lighting. It can play 4K sources and high dynamic range in the HDR10, HLG and HDR10+ formats, but not Dolby Vision. The 3000 lumens of claimed peak light output is reckoned to be capable of driving screens as big as 120 inches across.

The 4K support is achieved using Texas Instruments’ XPR pixel shifting technology rather than the sort of native 4K pixel counts you get with much more expensive projectors from Sony and JVC, but unlike other pixel-shift technologies, DLP’s approach has been deemed ‘true 4K’ by the Consumer Technology Association group in the US.

Connections on the TK705i comprise two HDMIs (one with eARC support for passing audio out to a soundbar or AVR), two USB-C ports, a 12V trigger port for powering up or down a motorised screen or curtains system, and a 3.5mm audio output. Plus, there’s wi-fi, of course, to support the projector’s built-in smart features.

The TK705i’s HDMIs don’t support 4K resolution at 120Hz. The best we could get was 4K/60Hz, in fact, complete with HDR resolution. No higher frame rates were showing as available, even if we lowered the resolution output from our Xbox Series X.

The projector does have a few helpful gaming features up its sleeve, though, including dedicated HDR RPG and FPS gaming modes designed to give the best experience for those sorts of games, and an impressively low standard input lag time in its Gaming mode of just 12.2ms.

While we didn’t find a way to achieve the 5ms of lag quoted as possible for the projector by BenQ, we did get it down to an extremely low 9.3ms by activating Gaming Boost mode. Note that this mode, however, turns off all of the image placement corrections you likely made during set-up – even the manual zoom function. So, unless you’re very lucky and the TK705i delivers a perfect image at just the right size and in just the right place in your living room with no corrective measures required, you’ll probably prefer to live with the extra 3ms of lag required to keep image set-up corrections intact.

Talking of set-up, the TK705i features a sophisticated Smart Image Adaptation system to help you get images appearing with the correct geometry and proportions with the minimum of manual intervention. This includes automatic 2D keystone adjustment, auto focus, automatic screen fit (provided your screen has a clearly defined border), auto obstacle avoidance that can shift pictures around objects that might sit between the projector and your screen, and automatic eye protection that turns the brightness down if you get your head too close to the lens.

There’s even an Auto Cinema Mode that can adapt the image’s tone and brightness based on analysis of both your wall colour and ambient light levels.

In the unlikely event that you still feel you need to fine-tune the image after the auto set-up features have done their thing, optical zoom, manual focus and digital image shift features are all provided in motorised form via the remote control.

The TK705i’s menus and smart features are delivered, as usual for BenQ, by the Google TV system. Which is mostly fine, except that the BBC iPlayer still refuses to play ball with it. Just about every other app is there, though, including the other key UK terrestrial broadcaster catch-up apps.

BenQ’s CinematicColor system for delivering ‘true to life’ colours is present and correct on the TK705i, and claims to be capable of covering 98 per cent of the Rec 709 standard dynamic range colour spectrum.

One final positive feature of note is the projector’s ability to run very quietly – as little as 24dB – for such a compact 3000-lumen-capable projector, even when showing HDR video.

Picture

While the TK705i’s pictures are unsurprisingly (given its price) not quite up there with the very best projectors in BenQ’s current range, they’re still enjoyable enough to make it look pretty good value.

The first thing that strikes us about the TK705i’s pictures is how bright they are. That 3000 lumens brightness claim feels slightly pessimistic, in fact, as the projector both punches through quite high levels of ambient light without its pictures feeling flat or washed out, and delivers intense, luminous-looking pictures in dark-room conditions.

The high brightness helps it deliver compelling HDR pictures by such affordable 4K projector standards, as well as allowing BenQ to provide a reasonable amount of flexibility over your preferred HDR ‘look’; in particular, how much the presentation favours brightness vs detail in bright areas.

Initially, we felt that the TK705i’s brightness seemed to be running slightly ahead of its colour performance, leaving tones feeling a little faded. A Dynamic Colour feature, though, does an excellent job of injecting more vibrancy into proceedings, resulting in a punchy, potent image with both SDR and HDR sources. This extra colour punch is delivered while retaining impressive levels of blend and tone subtlety, too.

No colour – not even skin tones – looks flat or plasticky under the Dynamic Colour regime, and while tones don’t look quite as uniformly natural and accurate as they do with BenQ’s finest projectors, no particular tones stand out too starkly from the rest.

In fact, it’s ultimately the balance and nuance the TK705i’s pictures retain despite their high brightness and Dynamic Colour vibrancy boost that most stands out against much of the competition at this level.

Motion looks clean and natural on the TK705i, even with 24p films, without any need to engage the motion processing options, and DLP projection’s rainbow effect issue, where red, green and blue stripes can flit over bright highlights, is controlled well enough not to become a serious distraction even to What Hi-Fi? team members who are particularly susceptible to seeing it.

There are a couple of areas, though, where the TK705i’s relative affordability shows through. First, its pictures aren’t quite as pin-sharp and detailed-looking as some of the best sub-£1500 projectors around. Pictures still look 4K, to be fair, regardless of whether you’re watching native 4K or HD sources, but they lack a little of that snap and crispness that we know DLP projectors are capable of (despite not using truly native 4K optical systems).

The biggest limitation of the TK705i, though, is its handling of dark scenes. While dark areas of mostly bright pictures look reasonably convincing and create a decent sense of contrast and depth, fully dark sequences look rather grey and flat as the projector struggles to resolve the sort of black levels movie fans love – and which BenQ is usually so good at producing.

Setting an Adaptive Luma feature to its Medium setting enhances the projector’s dynamic range and gives the image a bit more punch, which at least helps to hide the black level shortcomings – but it doesn’t completely solve the problem, and can cause some shadow detailing to go missing in the darkest corners.

To be fair, the TK705i’s black colour limitations are much less noticeable if you’re watching the projector in a non-blacked-out room – and relatively ‘lifestyle’ projectors such as the TK705i are much more likely to find themselves operating in ambient light than dedicated home cinema models. So, if your likely use case for a TK705i is going to be almost constant regular living room viewing, where removing all ambient light is pretty much impossible, its pictures could seriously work for you.

For a projector to bag that elusive fifth star, though, it needs to be able to adapt to serious movie nights a little better than the TK705i can.

Sound

Given that the TK705i’s cubic design is down at least in part to a desire to include decent integrated speakers, its sound performance comes as quite a disappointment.

Particularly troublesome is how bright and harsh high-pitched sound effects and voices are, especially at the sort of relatively high volumes many home cinema fans will want to push towards for movie nights.

Dense soundtrack moments also sound thin and sibilant at any sort of volume, and the tendency to exaggerate treble isn’t helped by the integrated 2 x 8W sound system’s bass limitations. The movie world’s deepest rumbles lack potency and presence relative to the rest of the sound presentation, can succumb to sort of whistling distortion at times, and can even just drop out of the sound presentation entirely when the going gets really deep.

The pity is that aside from the one-sided nature of the sound, there are signs of promise in the TK705i’s audio. Despite not being one of BenQ’s most powerful projector sound systems, for instance, it still manages to project elements of the sound beyond its bodywork, getting some value out of Dolby Atmos soundtracks and reducing the common projector sound sensation that what you’re hearing isn’t connected with the pictures across the room.

The harshness reduces substantially if you’re in a small enough room not to need the volume to be cranked high, too.

In the end, though, while the TK705i can get pretty loud and detailed for such a compact projector, that loudness just isn’t fun to listen to.

Verdict

The TK705i’s uniquely cute, living room-friendly design and bright, vibrant images will deservedly win it plenty of fans.

Rather lacklustre black levels for dark room viewing and a surprisingly bass-light and brittle sound system, though, mean that the TK705i ultimately falls short of becoming another five-star BenQ projector masterclass.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 2
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Epson EF-72

Also consider the Hisense M2 Pro

Read our BenQ W2700 review

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