BenQ W5850 review

While it might not look like it, the BenQ W5850 projector is a rather unusual beast.

In most ways, it is identical to the excellent W5800, but there’s one major difference: the lens.

The W5850 features a shorter-throw lens, making it possible to get a bigger image in a smaller room – even, potentially, from a coffee table (though there are reasons against using it as such, which we’ll get to).

But a lens is such a vital part of a projector, the obvious question is whether the performance has changed along with the flexibility.

Price

The BenQ W5850 is officially priced at £4599 / $4999 / AU$8499. That’s roughly (exactly, in the UK) what the W5800 launched for, though the older model can be bought for less while stocks last.

This is a very competitive area of the projector market, over which the Sony VPL-XW5000ES looms large. Sony’s four-time What Hi-Fi? Award-winner is officially priced at £5999 / $5998 / AU$9990, but it can now be bought for the same (or even less) money than the BenQ W5850.

The Epson EH-QB1000 is seriously worth considering, too, at least in the UK, where it costs £4799. The US and Australia prices of $7999 and AU$11,900, respectively, make it slightly less appealing.

Design

The BenQ is a large projector, but it wears its size well.

At 53cm, it's quite a lot wider than the Sony VPL-XW5000ES (46cm), but it’s also slimmer and much less deep. The dimensions and swoopy lines of the chassis make it look svelte and elegant, and from a distance at least, the gold ring around the lens cavity looks like a classy touch.

It really is a cavity, too. The projector arrives with the lens packaged separately. You need to line it up, insert it gently, and twist to click it into place. Some people might be put off by such things, but if you’re a nerd about home cinema, there’s something lovely and tactile about this little touch.

Equally pleasing is the gold-embossed envelope that’s found nestled at the top of the projector’s packaging and contains the ‘Individual Calibration Report’. This features graphs and measurements of the specific projector you’ve bought, produced in the factory after manual calibration by a BenQ technician.

The projector’s remote is really rather nice, too. It admittedly feels a little less premium than it looks, and it’s a little on the large side, but the buttons are sensibly laid out, clearly labelled (Epson, in particular, should take note here) and have a nice, soft feel. They’re backlit, too.

Features

The key, unique feature of the BenQ W5850 is its new lens. Where the W5800 has a 14-element lens with a 1.52-2.45 throw ratio, the W5850 has a 16-element lens with a much shorter throw ratio of 1.0-1.6.

The upshot of this is that the new model can produce a 180-inch image from a distance of roughly 4 metres, making it a better fit for small rooms where a very large picture is still required.

Set-up is still an absolute doddle, with the motorised focus, zoom and shift controls combining with that shorter throw ratio to make it very easy to fit the beamed picture to your screen.

As with the W5800, the W5850’s brightness is rated to ‘just’ 2700 lumens, but it’s worth noting several things here.

First, while the easy set-up and throw ratio might suggest flexible, coffee table-like use, this is very much a projector designed primarily for permanent set-up in a dedicated, light controlled home cinema, in which 2700 should be plenty.

Second, the multiple What Hi-Fi? Award-winning Sony VPL-XW5000ES is the class-leader, despite its 2000-lumen peak brightness.

And third, the BenQ W5800 proved to be plenty bright and punchy, so there’s little reason to think the W5850 won’t fare similarly.

Brightness is also just one element of a projector’s performance, of course, and the BenQ W5850 also boasts a 4K resolution. Admittedly, this isn’t quite native 4K in the manner of the Sony VPL-XW5000ES, but it is the CTA-approved version of 4K that is produced by DLP, rather than the ‘pixel-shift’ 4K of LCD models such as the Epson EH-QB1000.

As it does with the W5800, BenQ claims that the W5850 is able to reproduce 100 per cent of the so-called DCI-P3 colour spectrum, and without the need for a brightness-hampering filter.

HDR support is strong, too, with the HDR10+ dynamic tone mapping format supported alongside standard HDR10 and HLG.

Physical connections are fine, but unspectacular. There are two HDMI sockets, but neither supports 4K/120Hz signals. VRR and ALLM are, predictably, off the menu, too. All told, this is a much less appealing gaming projector than the Epson EH-QB1000 in particular.

Finally, as you would expect, given the home cinema focus, the W5850 lacks speakers and a smart platform – the expectation is that you will provide these via other components.

Picture

When watching an HDR movie, you have just two picture presets to choose from; HDR10 and Filmmaker Mode.

HDR10 is the projector at its most dynamic, but it’s also a little over-brightened and over-sharpened, which adds a touch of unnaturalism to the performance.

The Filmmaker Mode is much better, and while there are lots of picture settings that you can dig into if you so wish, we feel little reason to deviate from the preset’s defaults, which deliver a beautifully authentic, true-to-the-cinema experience complete with those lovely, calibrated colours.

Even without the added sharpness and brightness of the HDR10 preset, this is a beautifully crisp and punchy picture, with a winning combination of three-dimensional depth and contrasty pop.

Playing No Time To Die on 4K Blu-ray, the cliff-embedded city of Matera is resplendent in the background as Bond makes his way to Vesper’s resting place, with the projector doing an excellent job of defining the edges where the cluttered, squashed-together buildings built into the cliffside meet.

Colours are as beautifully judged as you’d hope from the bespoke calibration, with the dusty ground and ornate tombs baked by the warm sun but never looking oversaturated.

Bond’s skin, too, is tanned and vibrant, but thankfully a long way short of the slightly nuclear colour that less well-judged display devices often veer into, and his vibrant blue shirt stands out just as it should against his tan suit.

The detail in his face is superb but not forced. Freckles, pores and small scars are all visible, as are individual strands of hair, but there’s no sense of over-sharpening, and there’s lovely texture to his suit, which, close-up, looks almost like very fine corduroy. Does Bond really wear cord suits? This projector suggests that he does.

Great though it is with the mid-light action of No Time To Die, the BenQ W5850 is less comfortable with Alien: Romulus, the deep space opening of which is clearly less black than from the Sony VPL-XW5000ES.

The BenQ is a bit grey in comparison, and while you can improve back depth by reducing the laser brightness, doing so dulls the image just a little too much for our taste. Ultimately, the Sony blends the contrast extremes more effectively.

Sony’s projector also beats the BenQ where motion is concerned. The BenQ isn’t bad in this regard, but there’s undeniably more blur and judder to the slow progress of the science vessel at the start of the movie and the panning shots we see later.

This motion can be tightened up by activating BenQ's motion processing, but even the Low setting is too processed, making everything look unnaturally sharp and smooth. It’s a shame there’s not a much subtler option available.

Dropping down to The Nice Guys in HD and SDR, we find that we have to do some work to get a satisfying picture performance.

We find that Bright Cinema is the only preset that provides a satisfying cinematic warmth, with both the Filmmaker Mode and Cinema preset looking peculiarly cool.

But Bright Cinema is also too sharp, and – you guessed it – too bright. Our approach is to go with this preset and drop Sharpness, Pixel Enhancer 4K, and the Local Contrast Enhancer to 0 or Off, and change the Gamma Selection from ‘BenQ’ to the Filmmaker Mode’s 2.4.

You can, of course, come at it from the other way, adding warmth to the unsharpened Filmmaker Mode preset.

Whichever way you approach it, your effort is rewarded with a lovely picture – warm but dynamic, colourful but natural, crisp but controlled. It really is a delight, with only very rare scenes illustrating the slight lack of black depth.

Verdict

The BenQ W5850 is an excellent projector. The performance is very similar to that of the W5800, but the new lens adds flexibility and seems to create an even crisper image.

Sony’s Award-winning VPL-XW5000ES remains the benchmark at this level, primarily thanks to its deeper blacks and superior processing, but the W5850’s beautiful warmth and richness make it a delight to watch and live with.

An excellent alternative option, then, and a worthy recipient of five stars.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Build 4
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Sony VPL-XW5000ES

Also consider the Epson EH-QB1000

Read our BenQ W5800 review

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