We’re in Awards season. That means one thing: a gruelling hi-fi and home cinema battle royale, which runs until we have crowned a champion in each of our Best Buy categories.
While we always review as a team, each Awards category has one lead tester; and this year, once again, one of my categories is ultra-short-throw (UST) projectors.
Did I get a pang of jealousy as our senior staff writer, Lewis Empson, pulled the surround sound packages card out of the hat we use to sort our testing plan (joking)? A bit, but truthfully I was also quite happy to take this category.
I have reviewed, or at least been one of the team testing, most of the recent USTs to pass through our test rooms, and I understand their appeal at a personal and professional level.
An ultra-short-throw projector is an impressive piece of equipment: a single-box beamer, usually with an inbuilt sound system, it can throw a giant home cinema picture while sitting right next to the screen or wall it’s projecting onto.
So in theory, you have a home cinema in a box that can stream an 80- or even 200-plus-inch screen into even the smallest of living spaces as long as the projection area is big enough.
Done right, it can be a very compelling option for people like me, who are forced to use their narrow home office or a spare bedroom as their hobby/home cinema room. I have a Hisense PX3 connected to a JBL Bar 1300 in my attic AV cave/office for this reason.
I chose this specific combination, because the PX3 supports high-refresh-rate gaming. And, despite my best efforts, my room can’t accommodate the proper 5.2 system I yearn for, so the JBL Bar 1300 soundbar system is a nice middle ground between a full system and a basic soundbar.
Back to this year’s UST shootout, and as I descended into the darkness and began running the contenders head to head, from the moment I plugged the first UST in, I had a sense of déjà vu, as two old issues immediately reared their ugly heads.
The first is that, despite the marketing suggesting that these are a plug-and-play, simple option for home cinema fans, there is nothing simple about setting up a UST projector.
For yet another year, the process, regardless of manufacturer, remains the same: place the unit on a stand by your intended projection surface; turn it on and then adjust the feet and distance to make the projected guide image fit roughly on it; then run the autocorrection process, or manually make the necessary tweaks.
Neither option is good for your zen.
The ‘autocorrection’ process asks you to take a photo of a projected grid, then upload it to a site owned by the company. From there, it’s meant to tweak the settings to perfect the image. Except it doesn’t.
I make a point to always try the autocorrection at least half a dozen times before giving up. That remained the case this year, and I still have a batting average of zero successful runs. At least some things in life are consistent…
That would be fine, were it not for the fact that the manual correction process is outright painful too. You have to try to optimise the angle and height of the UST using the adjustable feet first: it’s a process that is the home cinema equivalent of trying to get a three-seater, L-shaped sofa up a spiral staircase.
Then, to add insult to injury, you have to adjust the projection area using manual corner controls. And these, inevitably, seem hell-bent on never quite being finessed enough to make the image perfectly square.
As a final annoyance, even minor movements can undo all your hard work. So if you have playful pets or a curious toddler, guard the UST with your life, or be prepared to start the process all over again.
Ask any of the team, and they would, I hope, tell you that I am normally an even-tempered sort of fella – the type you’d probably see chilling at a Grateful Dead concert. But during this year’s testing, the combination of frustrations meant that, once again, Lewis was subjected to a tirade of grumbles that would make a sailor blush during the set-up process.
The second issue, thankfully, isn’t as infuriating. If anything, to be fair, it is actually less pronounced this year.
Still, as I moved to the picture-testing part of our shootout, the moment I put our first 4K Blu-ray into our reference player, I spotted some issues with the USTs’ black levels.
Of course, no projector can match the perfect blacks of an OLED TV and its pixel-level light control. A UST, like any projector, produces images by projecting light onto a surface. And, unless a clever new technology comes out that somehow miraculously changes this, it won’t ever be able to create perfect blacks.
But as I went through the list of this year’s contenders, they still seem to fall into two camps in their attempts to overcome this inherent weakness.
On one side, we have what I like to call the grey beards.
These are the USTs that have decided not to hide the weakness and accept they can’t deliver perfect blacks. This can be a blessing, or a curse depending on how the strategy is implemented. But generally the compromise here is that, while dark scenes can look a little washed out and flat, they retain a decent amount of dark detail.
Then there’s the “Just For UST” camp.
These are the models that, like some men of a certain age (mine), are obsessed with trying to hide their greys. USTs in this camp tend to crank their contrast, making films look like a Frank Miller comic, offering an added level of punch but at the expense of detail. I particularly hate this approach.
Despite steps in the right direction, with blacks on some of the units I tested going deeper than I have seen on past USTs, all of the models at least partially fell into one of these camps, and couldn't quite nail dark scenes as a result.
Which is why, for the third year running, I find myself typing this feature, offering a minor word of warning to potential UST buyers: these devices can be magical for their intended market, and they are improving every year, but they still have a couple of niggling flaws to overcome as a category, compared with both TVs and full-fat long-throw projectors.
So, think hard about whether a UST really is right for your specific circumstances before investing in one.
If ease of use is your main priority, a home cinema-in-a-box coffee-table projector may be a better fit. If you want a proper home cinema, there is nothing like a decent long-throw unit. And if you’re not so bothered about screen size and just want a quality home movie experience, there are excellent OLED TVs available at the same price as most USTs.
USTs are designed and marketed to a specific type of home cinema fan for a reason.
MORE:
These are the best projectors we have reviewed
We rank the best Dolby Atmos soundbars
Our picks of the best surround sound systems
