BenQ W2000 – Sound Quality

For the record, I’d never recommend that you use the speakers built into a projector unless you really have to. It’s inevitable that the sound they produce won’t rival the scale of the pictures you’re watching or, won’t appear to be coming from the same location as the pictures.

Having said all that, the W2000 is the best sounding projector I’ve tested. It’s able to project its sound sfar enough from its chassis that it almost fools your ears into thinking the sound is coming from at least somewhere in the vicinity of the pictures on the screen – so long as you’re sat with the projector in front of you.

There’s a surprisingly open feeling to the mid-range too, as well as plenty of treble detailing from high quality movie mixes. You can also push things loud enough to create a movie feel without the speakers starting to break down.

Before we all get too carried away, though, the treble end of the soundstage is rather dominant, meaning it can lead to significant harshness at times if you try and run the audio too loud.

Other things to consider

Gamers may well be licking their lips at the thought of some big-screen Halo or Call of Duty on the W2000. So it’s good to find it scoring a respectable – though not amazing – 39ms input lag figure (the amount of time it takes to render its pictures). However, I’ve recorded figures as high as 60ms and as low as 30ms while arriving at the 39ms average.

More consistently impressive is how quietly the W2000 runs. That larger chassis design seems to help it dissipate heat much more effectively than BenQ’s earlier, similarly specified models. I didn’t feel disturbed by its cooling noise during even the quietest movie scenes.

Should I buy a BenQ W2000?

The W2000’s party trick of delivering Rec.709 remarkably well right out of the box deserves to find it an enthusiastic audience – especially as this core colour competency is joined by impressive refinement in other areas too. The only strange thing is that some of BenQ’s earlier models do a slightly better job with black level response.

Verdict

The W2000 ticks a lot of boxes for home cinema fans with its connectivity, unusually refined picture quality and genuinely effective out of the box Rec. 709 preset.

Trusted Score