Epson TW5910 – Features

The TW5910 employs the same straightforward if rather dull onscreen menu style witnessed on Epson’s other projectors this year, and manages to include some handy features too. These include a selection of gamma settings, a colour temperature adjustment, Eco and Normal lamp output modes, a selection of colour mode presets for different types of room environment (including Cinema, Living Room and Dynamic), and even a degree of colour management including being able to adjust the offset and gain of the RGB colour elements, and the hue, saturation and brightness of the RGBCMY colour elements.

You can adjust the machinations of the TW5910’s auto iris feature too, selecting either Normal or High Speed options or turning it off entirely, and there’s also a surprisingly effective skin tone adjuster that tweaks the way faces look in isolation from the rest of the picture.

Epson TW5910 – Picture Performance

The funny thing is, though, that despite having all these tools at our disposal, we didn’t need to use them much. For Epson has done an excellent job of getting colours looking good right out of the box – especially if you use the Cinema preset.

In a perfect world we’d recommend calming the blue down a touch and introducing slightly more red, to stop some dark scenes looking a bit ‘cool’. But if you can’t be bothered with that then rest assured the TW5910’s Cinema preset still gives you a better preset colour palette than most of its sub-£1000 brethren.

It also delivers a very detailed, crisp but also clean image, thanks to a combination of an astutely judged approach to sharpness and enough subtlety in its colour rendering to avoid the patchiness, striping and ‘plastic-skin’ issues commonly witnessed on budget projectors.

Epson TW5910 – Motion

The TW5910 doesn’t carry any motion processing, but nonetheless we still felt reasonably happy with its motion handling. Judder levels aren’t distracting, while the use of an LCD projection engine precludes the TW5910 from suffering the sort of fizzing noise problems over motion you can get with cheap DLP models. It’s worth adding, too, that LCD is immune to the ‘rainbow effect’ colour striping artefact often witnessed with affordable DLP models.

Yet more good news finds the TW5910 serving up brightness levels that give pictures a real sense of punch in dark rooms, but also enable the TW5910 to be used in rooms containing a little ambient light. This sort of flexibility will likely be very welcome to relatively casual users, for whom achieving total darkness in their room is probably be difficult if not totally impossible.