BenQ W4100i review

The BenQ W4100i is a slightly tricky projector to categorise.

With its relatively serious price point and specifications that include 3200 lumens of claimed brightness, LED lighting and coverage of 100 per cent of both the Rec 709 and HDR DCI-P3 colour ranges, it has the on-paper potential to be a proper home theatre performer.

Yet at the same time, it boasts a built-in audio system, Android TV smarts, and advanced auto set-up features – the sort of things we usually expect to find with a relatively casual living room projector.

In short, the W4100i sounds on paper like a more high-performance take on the sort of crossover projector BenQ has already delivered so successfully this year with the W2720i.

But does it really make sense to push such an all-rounder into the sort of higher price territory usually reserved for projectors more dedicated to specific home cinema or gaming?

Price

The BenQ W4100i costs £2999 in the UK, $2999 in the US and $4999 in Australia – prices that place it squarely in the middle of home cinema projector territory, or towards the upper end of the more casual home entertainment/living room projector world.

We mention both markets here because, as noted previously, BenQ’s latest projector seems unusually keen to straddle these usually disparate projector worlds. A trick that, if it pulls off, might make its price look very good value.

BenQ’s previously mentioned W2720i all-rounder costs £1999 / $2499 / AU$3299 in comparison, while key rivals in the W4100i’s price space would include Optoma’s UHZ68LV and Xgimi’s Aura 2 ultra short throw model.

Design

The W4100i boasts a mostly engagingly sleek and appealing form elevated by a crisp matte black finish, rounded corners, a strikingly low profile and heat venting that actually looks more like a design feature than just a practical necessity.

The top panel looks a touch untidy, though, thanks to it accommodating a slide-back panel over the focus and zoom rings around the lens barrel, and two separate horizontal and vertical image shifting wheels. Plus, there’s a rather clumsy bulge on the projector’s rear created by the cover BenQ provides to go over the slot-in Android TV dongle the projector ships with.

The W4100i’s remote control is a reasonably attractive addition to the package. It’s a full-sized affair with spacious and backlit buttons, and its white fascia looks crisp and clean, even if the finish is a bit plasticky.

Features

The BenQ W4100i has an unusually long feature count in keeping with its attempt to straddle the dedicated home cinema and more lifestyle projector markets. It’s a 4K projector, for starters, courtesy of DLP XPR technology, which uses pixel shifting to deliver a 4K effect (deemed true 4K by the Consumer Technology Association in the US) from a sub-4K count of DLP’s digital mirror devices (DMDs).

The W4100i is lit by LED light sources rather than lasers or the usual UHP lamps – a lighting choice that’s reckoned to yield between 20,000 and 30,000 hours of unbroken projection life, depending on which light mode you’ve selected.

It also supports HDR video, including the premium HDR10+ format. This adds extra scene-by-scene image data to help compatible displays deliver more accurate and punchy results.

BenQ’s HDR-Pro system, meanwhile, is on hand to provide a suite of technologies designed to continually optimise the HDR experience: Dynamic Tone Mapping continually remaps HDR10 and HLG sources to the projector’s maximum capabilities; Dynamic Black technology continually optimises the light output to deliver the best contrast the projector can manage; and an HDR Brightness feature adapts the W4100i’s light output based on the most popular home projector screen sizes.

The bright end of HDR’s expanded light range experience is bolstered by a high claimed maximum light output of 3200 lumens, and even more impressively for its mid-range price point, the W4100i claims to be capable of delivering a full 100 per cent of both the Rec 709 standard dynamic range and DCI-P3 high dynamic range colour gamuts. BenQ backs these claims up by including in each W4100i box actual calibration reports produced in the factory for your specific projector.

This factory calibration isn’t just about proving how wide the W4100i’s colour coverage is, though; it also means that every W4100i arrives with a picture preset pre-calibrated to deliver DeltaE errors for colour of less than two. This essentially means that the projectors can deliver colours so accurate to the industry standards used in content mastering studios that the human eye won’t be able to see the difference.

The W4100i continues this accuracy theme with a Filmmaker Mode formulated on the recommendations of the independent UHD Alliance, while at arguably the other end of the spectrum, there’s an AI Cinema Mode targeted mostly at streamed sources that can analyse content in real-time and automatically optimise the image’s HDR effect, colour saturation, sharpness and level of noise reduction.

While we might have complained about them on tidiness grounds earlier, in practical terms, we welcome the level of optical image set-up provided by the W4100i’s focus and zoom rings (the latter of which offers up to 1.3x optical zoom), and horizontal and vertical image shift wheels. Especially as the latter two options should remove the need in most rooms to deploy any image-distorting digital keystone correction.

These fairly advanced image set-up tools are joined by an excellent array of connections that includes three HDMIs rather than the two of most projectors. What’s more, one of these HDMIs is equipped with 4K/120Hz support for silky smooth gaming – a key gaming experience backed up by support for ALLM switching and a Game mode that results in a speedy (by projector standards) input lag time of 17.9ms with 4K/60Hz graphics.

The projector informs you if you run 120Hz games into it that it is turning off its Motion Enhancer 4K motion processing and noise reduction systems to optimise the gaming experience, but this is no more than we would expect any display to do. The only minor disappointment is that the projector doesn’t support VRR.

One of the other HDMIs can be used to pass sound, including Dolby Atmos mixes, through the projector to AVRs and soundbars able to support HDMI’s Audio Return Channel feature, while elsewhere the projector carries an optical digital audio output, a 3.5mm audio phono out, a USB Media Reader slot, a 2.5A powered USB port, and RS-232C and 12V control ports for integrating the projector into a wider home control system.

The W4100i’s audio features aren’t restricted to passing sound to external speaker systems. It also carries a single integrated 5W speaker to save you the trouble of finding an external audio source. Though it has to be said that on paper, at least, this speaker set-up is probably only going to work out as a sound system of last resort rather than all the sound you’ll ever need.

Last but not least on the W4100i’s main feature roster are the Android TV (Gen 11) smarts opened up by tucking the provided Android dongle beneath that detachable ‘cage’ on the projector’s rear. This Android implementation works reasonably slickly, and most of the key global streaming services (Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, Disney+ etc) are provided in nativised form, meaning they recognise the 4K HDR abilities of the projector and deliver the best quality streams accordingly.

There’s also support for Apple AirPlay and Google Cast, but unfortunately BenQ hasn’t found a way around Android’s blind spot when it comes to some of the UK’s key terrestrial broadcaster catch-up services. So, at the time of writing, there is no sign of the BBC iPlayer, ITVX or Channel 4 apps, which is a major disappointment.

Picture

The W4100i’s picture performance gets off to a flyer by beautifully living up to BenQ’s colour promises. It reaches colour saturation and volume levels with the most aggressive HDR 4K Blu-rays in our collection that comfortably exceed those of any other projector in its class, bar, perhaps, one or two of Xgimi’s recent models.

It does this without needing to introduce any brightness-reducing wide colour filters, too, and best of all, it does so without any colour starting to feel overcooked or out of balance (as can happen at times with those Xgimi models).

There’s nothing cartoonish or flat about the W4100i’s colour heroics either. On the contrary, it retains enough tonal subtlety even with the most vibrant HDR colours to ensure that pictures always look full of texture and nuance, giving them a three-dimensional and realistic feel.

The brightest peaks of HDR images are delivered with plenty of intensity by projector standards, too, and feel like they’re taking full advantage of BenQ’s 3200 lumen brightness claims. Especially, strangely, if you’re not using the projector’s dynamic tone mapping feature.

The W4100i’s brightness is substantial enough, too, to help its images punch through moderate levels of ambient light, which is very useful if you’re not able to establish a completely blacked out room. This reminds us that this projector is seemingly designed to cope with quite a variety of different room arrangements – though an at least near-black room would be our preference for the W4100i whenever you’re able to achieve it.

While the Dynamic Tone Mapping can slightly subdue the W4100i’s brightness, we’d still actually recommend using it for most HDR sources as it tends to imbue HDR images with a greater sense of solidity and contrast, making them feel more cinematic and three-dimensional. If you really want to add more punch to the Dynamic Tone Mapping system, a Local Contrast Enhancer tool lets you introduce a bit more pop to highlights without upsetting the sense of balance and naturalism.

Native 4K sources look effortlessly crisp and textured, and the sharpness holds up well with 24fps movie content – especially as judder over motion and during camera pans is handled impressively cleanly for such a bright projector.

The good news continues with the W4100i’s gaming talents. Its 4K/120Hz support is retained with HDR still in play, and delivers a fluid, responsive experience in the projector’s game mode that’s bolstered by precious little (for a projector) input lag. The general colour punch, brightness and sharpness play nicely with gaming graphics, too.

While we’re not at a place yet where we feel AI’s understanding of picture quality trumps what we – and by extension, you – might achieve yourself with careful tweaking of the W4100i’s long set of picture adjustments, BenQ’s HDR AI Cinema mode is actually one of the better AI picture presets we’ve seen thanks to the way it typically mildly enhances both colour and contrast without making the results feel forced or strained.

The downside, though, is that it defaults to a ‘High’ Dynamic HDR setting that can cause brightness and colour instability as the image constantly tries to optimise itself to the incoming content. Switching to the Low Dynamic setting calms this instability down, but the resulting picture feels much flatter/less HDR, leaving us feeling that a few more setting options for this feature might have been a good idea.

There are a few other niggles with the W4100i’s pictures to cover, too. The projector’s noise reduction system, for starters, is bizarrely terrible, causing egregious amounts of lag, smearing and smudging, especially during dark scenes. Make sure this feature is turned off at all times (noting that it’s set to on by default with the projector’s HDR10 mode).

Another issue you can’t work your way around is some fairly pronounced rainbow effect (fleeting stripes of pure red, green and blue) over bright highlights when they appear against dark backdrops. Also, a little surprisingly for a BenQ projector, the W4100i’s handling of dark scenes is a bit underwhelming, leaving dark picture areas looking a little greyer in blacked-out room settings than expected. Especially, unfortunately, while using the Filmmaker Mode preset that many film fans will likely want to turn to on movie nights.

The W4100i’s black levels are far from the worst we’ve seen in the HDR projector world, to be clear. They’re certainly not unwatchably bad by any stretch of the imagination. They are just limited enough, though, to make us question whether the W4100i’s extra brightness over the W2720i is necessarily a great investment for the extra money it costs – unless, anyway, you really envisage using your projector quite often in fairly bright rooms.

Sound

The W4100i’s single 5W speaker is slightly better than expected, without exactly setting the projector audio world on fire.

Starting with the downsides, the W4100i’s sound feels a bit ‘locked in’, lacking the sort of outward projection it would need to produce if it were to feel in any way married up with the images on the screen. The speaker isn’t sensitive enough to portray every detail in subtle movie soundtrack mixes either, especially when it comes to relatively faint low-frequency sounds. And nor does it have enough headroom or power to produce any real sense of expansion during escalating action or horror scenes.

This is all especially true, oddly, with Dolby Atmos mixes; things sound slightly louder and clearer with DTS-HD or Dolby Digital mixes.

The good news is that there’s just enough volume at max levels to make a film soundtrack at least intelligible (even if it doesn’t exactly make you feel immersed in the world you’re watching). Dialogue tends to remain clear, too, even during dense soundtrack moments, and while bass only kicks in rather sporadically, at least when it does crop up, it doesn’t succumb to nasty distortions, crackles or buzzes.

Verdict

The W4100i is a good projector. Its colour capabilities in particular are outstanding; it’s bright enough to work in a degree of ambient light as well as delivering punchy pictures in dark home theatre spaces; and it does double duty as a fun gaming display.

Its quest for brightness, though, causes just enough trouble with rainbow effect and dark scene greyness to stop it from feeling quite as heroic for its money as one or two of its recent BenQ siblings.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 3
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the BenQ W2720i

Also consider the Optoma UHZ68LV

Read our Xgimi Aura 2 review

Best projectors: budget, 4K and ultra-short-throw