Home cinema is a market bursting with potential. Nick Ross takes a look at Epson’s affordable, 4K laser projector to see where it fits into that picture.

Projectors frequently promise much but deliver disappointment. Image quality is perpetually improving but, in the face of ever-growing TVs that cost increasingly less money, their raison d’être is becoming increasingly challenged.

Yet, I was particularly intrigued by Epson’s home-cinema designated, EH-LS12000B which, on paper, looks to be a perfect crossover between a big TV and public cinema. Could this be a device that every level of home theatre enthusiast should add to their shortlist?

Features and installation

The headline specs are impressive: there’s a brand new, 2,700-lumen, laser light source that supports HDR10+, is capable of delivering a whopping 2,500,000 contrast ratio and has a 20,000-hour lifespan; it supports 4K with a much-faster, 32-bit image processor; there’s HDMI 2.1 for 120Hz UHD gaming and it’s got a near-instant-on start-up time. The optimum image size is between 100 and 300 inches and it costs just $8,999.

Not long ago, that price would look like a misprint – like there’s a 1 or 2 missing from the front of it. But here we have a device that shares headline specs with the best TVs yet is capable of delivering an image that makes an 85” Samsung seem small and expensive.

Naturally, there are caveats. To create a 100” image, it needs to be 3m-to-6.3m (depending on the 2.1x optical zoom) away from a screen while the 300” limit requires a minimum 9.1m. While this will preclude all but the larger lounge rooms, you don’t necessarily need a dedicated personal cinema to make use of it. The relatively diminutive dimensions of 447 x 520 x 193mm open the door wider to those who want to build a UHD home cinema in a smaller space, as will the relatively light 12.7KG weight which enables more ceiling-mounted scenarios.

Epson also pushes its broad keystone and lens shift adjustment features. The former has a tendency to butcher image quality when transforming an off-centred, trapezoidal image into a symmetrical 16:9 format, but my testing demonstrated that this wasn’t an issue – even when pushing the -30 to +30 degree horizontal and vertical limits.

Meanwhile the generous ±96.3% vertical and ±47.1% horizontal lens shift, afforded by the three-axis, motorised lens, means you can install the projector way off-centre (avoiding ceiling fans and lights etc) and still get the image appearing properly centred on the wall you want.

Epson has also designed the exhaust fan to be front facing so you can install it up against a wall at the back of a room without fear of overheating. It sports a tightly sealed chassis to limit light leakage and emits an undistracting, quiet, 30dB whir (20dB in Quiet Mode) to avoid interfering with viewers’ immersion.

This all means that even someone with a modest lounge room can consider installing an EH-LS12000B.

Technology

Before we tackle performance, it’s worth investigating the technology that sets Epson’s EH-LS12000B apart. It starts from the laser light source which emits blue light that is then split into yellow and blue components using both a phosphor wheel and diffuser (respectively). The resulting light is then recombined to form a pure, bright, white light which gets dynamically adjusted by two RGB sensors to add more yellow or blue filtration if a scene requires white balance adjustments.

Colour is created through Epson’s elaborate three LCD system which isolates each RGB light path to avoid the rainbow effects and banding that blight rival products. It also means that the high, 2,700 lumens brightness is standard across white light and coloured light for a uniform picture brightness that many competitors can’t match.

The use of the laser significantly enhances contrast due to it being a dimmable light source – unlike a traditional bulb. This is partly what enables the darker-end of the high dynamic range and 10-bit colour processing.

Brightness is enhanced by eschewing a 4K image panel for Full HD. This can by visualised by imagining two, similar-sized, small, wired-mesh sieves: one with 1080 x 1920 holes and the other 3840 x 2160 holes. The holes in the denser sieve are finer but less light passes through them.

The natural question is then, how does one make a 4K image out of 1080p? The answer gets complex: Epson says its new ‘4K shift device’ uses two axes to generate the 4K picture using four 1080p components by optimising the physics of wave forms.

The dumbed-down version is that the 1080p image emitter is rapidly rotated to create four separate Full HD images to generate the 4K image.

Finally, the new, 32-bit image processor is significantly faster than the previous 12-bit processor and allows enhancements like 4K image interpolation to further improve picture quality for different media types, like sport. All of this is pumped through a high-quality, 15-element cinema lens.

For those concerned that complexity equates to higher breakdown potential, note the three-year warranty.

How does it perform?

In short, very well. As usual, the darker the room the better. Un-curtained windows and regular indoor lighting naturally wash out the image and kill contrast. But the high brightness and colour performance does allow for excellent image quality in a large lounge room with a couple of side lamps on – it needn’t be pitch black. Also note that the unit was tested with a standard, drop-down projector screen and a 300” image.

Watching movies was a joy thanks to impressive contrast (including almost true-black letterbox bars), bright colours and silky-smooth motion. The image genuinely felt like it successfully entwined top TV performance with a cinema’s large-screen thrills. Colour transitions and monochromatic gradients weren’t blighted by stepping, there was no immersion-destroying ‘Soap Opera effect’ (which turns characters in a scene into actors on a set) and panning shots avoided juddering in all directions.

I also tried gaming. The sub-20ms input lag eliminated most playability issues although some fast-and-frantic, competitive players may disagree (this isn’t for them, anyway). The 120Hz refresh rate ensured all motion was rendered smoothly.

I was impressed with sports performance too. The rapid motion of players was handled with aplomb, and I was fully immersed without suffering from any image smearing.

There are several pre-set image modes accessible via the remote. However, ‘Bight Cinema’ was the only choice worth making as others lost various combinations of colour vibrancy, contrast and detail. It was also the only mode that could properly display a bright starfield on a black background.

Once it’s all set-up, there are few people who won’t be impressed. However, there are a few small concerns. The labyrinthine menu system will perplex all but enthusiasts and, while the remote is responsive and backlit, buttons like Lens 1 can move the image into the walls and floor with no obvious way to get it back! This all offers great potential to professional installers but also increases the propensity for support callouts should the end-user accidentally activate the wrong setting.

Ultimately, the Epson EH-LS12000B makes you feel like you’re in a cinema but, naturally, you still need a big, dark room to make the most of it. Nonetheless, it should be on the shortlist of any level of home cinema enthusiast, and I expect the price, size and performance to expand the size of this market.